[logancg]

There are a lot of talented ML researchers in China. This is a product of (a) the government and major companies (i.e. BAT) investing heavily in fundamental ML research (b) the population size (c) a long tradition of STEM-focused education in China. So, it's not surprising that would be the case.

The interesting questions are if China is uniquely focused on deep learning over other ML techniques, and Chinese research compares in terms of quality. Anecdotally (speaking as a researcher in the field) papers from Chinese institutions seem disproportionately focused on deep learning (whereas, for example, the UK does great work in Bayesian ML and the US does disproprotionately well in NLP). I'm not a deep learning researcher so I can't judge the technical merit, but I was just at NeurIPS in Montreal, and I saw about equal representation of Chinese institutions as South Korean ones. South Korea, with ~1/25 the population, punches way above its weight per capita.

[taneq]

I thought the question was more "why arXiv and not other journals" in which case maybe 'prestigious' Western journal publications just aren't valued as much in China?

[nl]

Almost all ML research is published on arXiv.

In ML (as in most of Comp Sci) conference proceedings (NeurIPS, ICML etc) are where the prestige publishing is.

[HuShifang]

I can't speak specifically to this topical domain, but generally speaking (assuming the research topic isn't politically sensitive) there are professional incentives to do transnational work -- whether it's publishing in Anglophone journals, organizing international conferences, etc. So probably, it's not that foreign journals are valued less. (Probably, in fact, the contrary.)

[lettergram]

Perhaps their papers are disproportionately not accepted to conferences so we see many more on arXiv