It is the first time a Chinese team has won this award at NeurIPS, a top-tier AI conference regarded as the field’s Oscar ceremony.
Ren Shaoqing, Vice President and Chief Expert of Intelligent Driving R&D, recently earned the prestigious Test of Time Award from the 2025 NeurIPS conference.
The award-winning work, “Faster R-CNN,” was published in 2015. The research was led by Ren Shaoqing, He Kaiming, and Sun Jian, in collaboration with American AI scientist Ross Girshick. Ren Shaoqing served as the first author.
It is reported that the conference paper and its extended journal version have garnered over 98,000 academic citations. This makes it the highest-cited paper at the conference with a Chinese first author, as well as the most globally cited paper in the field of AI object detection.
NeurIPS is the most influential top-tier international academic conference in artificial intelligence and machine learning, ranked first in the AI field. This marks the first time a Chinese research team has received this honor at this prestigious event, often regarded as the “Oscars of the AI World.”
Looking back at Ren Shaoqing’s career, his path has blended both industrial and academic pursuits.
In 2016, after completing his Ph.D., Ren joined Momenta as R&D Director and Co-founder. In 2020, he officially joined NIO, starting as Chief Expert of Autonomous Driving R&D and Assistant Vice President. By 2023, he was promoted to Vice President of R&D, taking full responsibility for intelligent driving technology development. At the end of 2024, following a restructuring of NIO’s intelligent driving department, he directly oversaw the newly established Technical Committee and led the Large Model Department, further expanding his scope of authority.
During his tenure at NIO, Ren Shaoqing led the large-scale deployment of Urban Navigate on Pilot (NOA) and the iterative upgrades of the NOP+ feature. In 2025, the Neural World Model (NWM) developed by his team became the core technology for NIO’s autonomous driving systems.
It is also worth noting that in September of this year, Ren Shaoqing joined the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) to lead the development of an AI laboratory, while explicitly stating that his “role at NIO remains unchanged.” This deep integration of “industry-academia-research” provides NIO’s technological innovation with enhanced support from cutting-edge theoretical exploration.
As of November 2025, Ren Shaoqing’s academic publications have been cited over 460,000 times, ranking first among domestic scholars across all disciplines and placing him among the top three Chinese scholars globally.
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