Academia Sinica: YOLOv4

YOLOv4-tiny is a lightweight variant of YOLOv4 developed by Academia Sinica, released in November 2020. It retains the core YOLOv4 design principles while significantly reducing the number of convolutional layers and feature map channels to produce a model suitable for inference on devices with limited compute, including embedded hardware and mobile CPUs. It uses a simplified CSP backbone with fewer layers and two detection scales rather than three.YOLOv4-tiny is optimized for scenarios where inference speed is prioritized over peak accuracy, achieving substantially higher FPS than full YOLOv4 at the cost of reduced AP on standard benchmarks. It is commonly used in robotics, embedded vision systems, and applications where real-time detection is required without GPU acceleration.

YOLOv7 is a real-time object detection model developed by Chien-Yao Wang and Hong-Yuan Mark Liao at Academia Sinica, released in July 2022 under the GPL-3.0 license. It introduces Extended Efficient Layer Aggregation Networks (E-ELAN) for improved gradient flow in the backbone, and trainable bag-of-freebies techniques including coarse-to-fine lead guided label assignment and auxiliary heads that improve accuracy without adding inference cost.YOLOv7 achieves 56.8% AP on COCO at 30 FPS on a V100 GPU at the time of release, establishing a strong accuracy-speed tradeoff among real-time detectors. It supports detection, instance segmentation, and pose estimation variants. YOLOv7 is deployable through Roboflow Inference and the standard training pipeline in the official repository.

YOLOv5 is an object detection model developed by Ultralytics, released in June 2020 under the AGPL-3.0 license. It is implemented in PyTorch and introduced a more accessible and well-documented YOLO implementation compared to earlier Darknet-based versions, with an integrated training and export pipeline supporting a wide range of deployment targets. YOLOv5 uses a CSP backbone, PANet neck, and a single-stage detection head with anchor-based regression.YOLOv5 is available in five sizes from Nano to Extra Large and supports export to ONNX, TensorRT, CoreML, and other formats. It is one of the most widely deployed object detection models in production environments and remains a common starting point for custom detection model training due to its documentation, community support, and compatibility with Roboflow Inference.

YOLO11 is an object detection and multi-task vision model developed by Ultralytics, released in September 2024 under the AGPL-3.0 license. It is the latest generation in the Ultralytics YOLO series and supports object detection, instance segmentation, image classification, pose estimation, and oriented bounding box detection within a single unified framework. YOLO11 introduces architectural refinements that improve accuracy while reducing parameter count compared to YOLOv8 at equivalent model sizes.YOLO11 is available in five model sizes from Nano to Extra Large and is deployable through the Ultralytics Python package, Roboflow Inference, and export formats including ONNX, TensorRT, and CoreML. It supports fine-tuning on custom datasets through the standard Ultralytics training API.

RF-DETR is a real-time transformer-based object detection model developed by Roboflow, with code and weights first released in March 2025 under the Apache 2.0 license. It is the first real-time model to exceed 60 AP on the Microsoft COCO benchmark, built on a DINOv2 vision transformer backbone with weight-sharing neural architecture search used to identify accuracy-latency trade-offs. The full family spans six sizes from Nano (30.5M parameters, 384×384 input) to 2XL (126.9M parameters, 880×880 input), with the accompanying research paper accepted to ICLR 2026.RF-DETR is designed for strong domain adaptability, achieving state-of-the-art performance on RF100-VL, a benchmark measuring generalization to real-world object detection tasks across diverse domains. It is deployable through Roboflow Inference and supports fine-tuning on custom datasets, making it well suited for domain-specific applications with limited training data.