Deci AI: YOLO-NAS

YOLO-NAS Overview

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 Deci AI was acquired by NVIDIA in April 2024, and the super-gradients repository is no longer actively maintained by the original team.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.

YOLO-NAS Interactive Demo

YOLO-NAS Details & Performance

Details

Resources

Vision Tasks

Object Detection

Features

Real-Time Vision

Usage

Past 30 Days

Performance

Avg. Latency

Arena Rankings

Not yet ranked in arena

Alternatives to YOLO-NAS

Other models worth comparing for similar use cases.

YOLOv8
YOLOv8 is an object detection and multi-task vision model developed by Ultralytics, released in January 2023 under the AGPL-3.0 license. It succeeds YOLOv5 and introduces an anchor-free detection head, a new C2f module for improved gradient flow, and a decoupled head that separates classification and regression tasks. These changes improve both accuracy and training efficiency compared to earlier Ultralytics models.YOLOv8 supports object detection, instance segmentation, image classification, pose estimation, and oriented bounding box detection within a unified codebase. It is available in five sizes from Nano to Extra Large and exports to ONNX, TensorRT, CoreML, and other formats. YOLOv8 is one of the most widely adopted detection models in production and is directly supported by Roboflow Inference for custom model training and deployment.
YOLO11
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.
YOLOv9
YOLOv9 is a real-time object detection model developed by Chien-Yao Wang and Hong-Yuan Mark Liao at Academia Sinica, released in February 2024 under the GPL-3.0 license. It introduces Programmable Gradient Information (PGI), a mechanism that preserves complete input information through auxiliary reversible branches during training to address information loss in deep network layers. It also introduces the Generalized Efficient Layer Aggregation Network (GELAN), which achieves better parameter utilization compared to prior CSP-based designs.YOLOv9-C achieves 53.0% AP on COCO with 42% fewer parameters and 21% less computation than YOLOv8-C at comparable accuracy. YOLOv9-E achieves 55.6% AP. The model is deployable through Roboflow Inference and supports fine-tuning via the standard training pipeline in the official repository.
YOLOv10
YOLOv10 is a real-time end-to-end object detection model developed by THU-MIG at Tsinghua University, released in May 2024 under the AGPL-3.0 license. It introduces consistent dual assignments during training — using both one-to-many and one-to-one label assignment strategies — to eliminate the need for non-maximum suppression at inference time while maintaining competitive accuracy. This end-to-end design reduces inference latency compared to NMS-dependent detectors at similar accuracy levels.YOLOv10-B achieves 52.7% AP on COCO with 46% lower latency than YOLOv9-C at comparable performance. The model is available in six sizes from Nano to Extra Large, built on the Ultralytics framework, and exportable to ONNX, TensorRT, and CoreML. YOLOv10 is suited for latency-sensitive deployment scenarios where post-processing overhead is a constraint.
Baidu
RT-DETR
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.
RF-DETR
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.

YOLO-NAS License

Custom

License terms and commercial-use guidance for YOLO-NAS.

License information is provided as a guide and is not legal advice.