Researcher trades authorship for CVPR fees

AI research's prestige economy is fundamentally broken for independent talent in the Global South.

• –Registration fees of $800+ USD act as a wealth-based filter, effectively barring orphaned or unaffiliated researchers from archival recognition despite technical merit.
• –Trading co-authorship for funding violates COPE ethics guidelines and risks paper retraction, yet remains a desperate survival tactic for those without institutional backing.
• –Traditional grant systems like ANRF (India) require institutional endorsement, creating a catch-22 for brilliant "rogue" researchers who cannot afford the entry fee to the academic system.
• –The AI community lacks a robust, automated waiver system for independent researchers who have already cleared the peer-review hurdle but face extreme hardship.