RT-DETR vs YOLO-NAS

RT-DETR (Real-Time Detection Transformer) is an object detection model developed by Baidu, released in April 2023 under the Apache 2.0 license. It is the first transformer-based real-time object detector, addressing the inference speed limitations of earlier DETR models through an efficient hybrid encoder that decouples intra-scale interaction and cross-scale fusion, enabling the model to process multi-scale features without the high computational overhead of standard transformer encoders.

RT-DETR achieves 53.1% AP on COCO at 108 FPS on an NVIDIA T4 GPU for the RT-DETR-L variant, outperforming comparably sized YOLO detectors at similar speeds. It maintains end-to-end inference without non-maximum suppression, simplifying deployment pipelines. RT-DETR established the baseline for real-time transformer detection and has been extended by subsequent works including RF-DETR and RT-DETRv2.

YOLO-NAS is an object detection model developed by Deci AI, released in May 2023 as part of the super-gradients open-source training library. The architecture was generated using Deci's proprietary Neural Architecture Search technology, AutoNAC, which searches for network structures that balance accuracy and inference latency on target hardware. This produced three model sizes (small, medium, and large) featuring quantization-friendly blocks that reduce accuracy loss when converting weights to INT8 precision for deployment on edge devices and mobile hardware.

YOLO-NAS achieves competitive accuracy-latency tradeoffs against YOLOv5, YOLOv6, YOLOv7, and YOLOv8 on the Microsoft COCO benchmark at release, and ships with pretraining on Objects365 in addition to COCO. Note that YOLO-NAS uses a custom license: the surrounding super-gradients framework code is Apache-2.0, but the YOLO-NAS model weights are released under a separate non-commercial license that restricts production and commercial use. Teams evaluating YOLO-NAS for commercial applications should review the LICENSE.YOLONAS.md terms directly. Deci AI was acquired by NVIDIA in April 2024, and the super-gradients repository is no longer actively maintained by the original team. Users can still download and use the released weights, but no further updates or new variants are expected.