Roboflow

YOLO World Overview

YOLO-World v2 Small (YOLO-World-S-v2) is the smallest variant of Tencent AI Lab’s YOLO-World v2 family, released around February 2024 under GPL-v3. With ~13 million parameters, it adopts a prompt-then-detect paradigm using offline vocabularies and is pretrained on large-scale datasets such as Objects365 and GoldG. The model processes image inputs at 640×640 or 1280×1280 resolutions and supports zero-shot open-vocabulary object detection, enabling recognition of novel categories from text prompts without retraining.

Evaluations show competitive results across benchmarks like LVIS and COCO, while maintaining real-time efficiency. On an NVIDIA V100, the small variant reaches ~74 FPS at standard resolutions. Together with larger YOLO-World v2 models, it provides a scalable framework for efficient, open-vocabulary detection across diverse deployment settings.

YOLO World Interactive Demo

YOLO World Details & Performance

Vision Tasks

Object DetectionOpen Vocabulary Object DetectionPhrase Grounding

Features

Multimodal VisionReal-Time VisionZero-shot Detection

Usage

Past 30 Days

Performance

Avg. Latency

Arena Rankings

YOLO World Vision Evals

YOLO World has not yet been evaluated on the current benchmark. The results below are from the legacy version of Vision Evals, our previous benchmark. See the current Vision Evals

HighestLowest
This model#4 of 529.8% pmF1 · better than 20%
Score29.8%pmF1 across 250 queries
Speed0.33savg response per query
Costpricing unavailable
Tokenstokens unavailable
Score key:≥75%40–74%<40%
DatasetScore
COCO-100
44.9%
SaCo-Gold
7.2%

Scores based on a single evaluation run · Methodology

View all legacy Vision Evals results →

Alternatives to YOLO World

Other models worth comparing for similar use cases.

THU-MIG
YOLOE
YOLOE (YOLO with Everything) is an open-vocabulary object detection and segmentation model developed by THU-MIG at Tsinghua University, released in March 2025 under the AGPL-3.0 license. It extends the YOLO architecture to support open-vocabulary detection through text and visual prompts, enabling the model to detect arbitrary object categories beyond a fixed training set without retraining. The design integrates prompt encoding directly into the YOLO framework while preserving real-time inference speed.YOLOE is evaluated on COCO and LVIS benchmarks and supports both closed-set and open-vocabulary detection modes. It is built on the Ultralytics codebase and maintains compatibility with standard YOLO training and export workflows. YOLOE is suited for applications requiring flexible, prompt-driven object detection where the target object vocabulary may change at inference time.
IDEA Research
Grounding DINO
Grounding DINO is an open-vocabulary object detection model developed by IDEA Research, released in March 2023 under the Apache 2.0 license. It extends the DINO transformer-based detector with grounded pre-training, enabling it to detect arbitrary objects described by free-form text queries rather than a fixed set of predefined categories. The model integrates a text encoder with a visual backbone through a feature fusion module that aligns language and visual representations at multiple scales.Grounding DINO achieves strong zero-shot detection performance on COCO, LVIS, and ODinW benchmarks, and supports referring expression comprehension tasks. It is widely used as a foundation for open-vocabulary detection pipelines and as the detection backbone in systems such as Grounded-SAM. The model is particularly suited for applications requiring flexible, text-driven object localization across diverse domains.
Google
OWL-ViT
OWL-ViT (Open-World Localization with Vision Transformers) is an open-vocabulary object detection model released in May 2022 by Google Research. It adapts a pretrained CLIP-style image-text model by removing the final pooling layer and attaching lightweight classification and box prediction heads to each Transformer output token, producing a detector capable of localizing arbitrary objects described by free-form text at inference time. Rather than being restricted to a fixed taxonomy such as the 80 categories in Microsoft COCO, OWL-ViT can detect object classes specified by a user's text query, including categories the model was never explicitly trained on.OWL-ViT accepts an image and a list of text queries as input, and produces bounding boxes with class assignments drawn from the supplied queries. It also supports one-shot image-conditioned detection, where a cropped image region is used as the query instead of text, allowing the model to find visually similar instances within a target scene. The model is released in multiple Vision Transformer sizes (ViT-B/32, ViT-B/16, ViT-L/14) and CLIP-pretrained variants, distributed through the Google Research scenic repository and Hugging Face under the Apache 2.0 license. A successor model, OWLv2, was released in June 2023, introducing the OWL-ST self-training recipe that scales training to over one billion pseudo-annotated examples and substantially improves detection performance on rare and long-tail categories while preserving the open-vocabulary interface.
Azure
Florence-2
Florence-2, introduced by Microsoft Research at CVPR 2024, is an open-source vision-language foundation model designed to unify diverse computer vision tasks within a single sequence-to-sequence framework. Unlike traditional models that specialize in specific tasks, Florence-2 accepts both images and text prompts and outputs text for tasks such as captioning, object detection, segmentation, OCR, and region-based grounding. It comes in two sizes—Florence-2-base (~230M parameters) and Florence-2-large (~770M parameters)—and is trained on FLD-5B, a large dataset of ~126M images with ~5.4B annotations.The model demonstrates strong zero-shot and fine-tuned performance, often rivaling larger vision-language systems while remaining lightweight and efficient. Released under the MIT license, all weights are publicly available, making it accessible for fine-tuning and deployment in applications like VQA, content tagging, accessibility, and research. Florence-2’s compact design, versatility, and openness position it as a practical alternative to larger proprietary multimodal models.
Meta
SAM 3
Released on November 19th, 2025, Segment Anything 3 (SAM 3) is a zero-shot image segmentation model that “detects, segments, and tracks objects in images and videos based on concept prompts.” This model was developed by Meta as the third model in the Segment Anything series.

Unlike its previous SAM models (Segment Anything and Segment Anything 2), you can provide SAM 3 with the prompt “shipping container” and it will generate precise segmentation masks for all shipping containers in an image. SAM 3 generates segmentation masks that correspond to the location of the objects found with a text prompt.
IDEA Research
Grounded SAM
Grounded SAM is an open-vocabulary image segmentation model developed by IDEA Research, released in January 2024 under the Apache 2.0 license. It combines Grounding DINO, a zero-shot open-vocabulary object detector, with the Segment Anything Model to produce precise segmentation masks for objects identified through free-form text prompts. The two models are used sequentially: Grounding DINO localizes objects from a text query, and SAM generates the corresponding segmentation masks.Grounded SAM enables zero-shot instance segmentation without task-specific training data, making it applicable to domains where labeled segmentation data is scarce. It supports arbitrary text queries and can segment objects not represented in standard training sets. The model is commonly used in automated labeling pipelines, robotic perception, and domain-specific vision applications requiring open-vocabulary segmentation.

Deploy YOLO World with an API

YOLO World runs as a hosted REST endpoint through Roboflow Workflows. Pick a task, then hand the prompt to your coding agent or copy the code. Deploying the workflow into a free Roboflow workspace replaces the your-workspace and YOUR_API_KEY placeholders with your own.

Connect your agent to Roboflow (once)

Add the Roboflow MCP server

claude mcp add --transport http roboflow https://mcp.roboflow.com/mcp

Run /mcp and authorize Roboflow in your browser when the OAuth flow opens.

Start a new Claude Code session so the MCP loads, then paste the prompt below (it works the same in any agent).

Deploy this workflow to your Roboflow workspace to use it.

Integrate the Roboflow "YOLO World" workflow into my app.

- Endpoint: POST https://serverless.roboflow.com/<your-workspace>/workflows/yolo-world-object-detection
- Auth: send my Roboflow API key as `api_key` in the request body, read from the ROBOFLOW_API_KEY env var (never hardcode).
- Body: { "api_key": ..., "inputs": { `image`: { type: "url" | "base64", value }, `classes`: string array } }.

With the Roboflow MCP connected, call `workflows_get` on "yolo-world-object-detection" to read the exact input schema (the source of truth), then `workflows_run` on a sample image to confirm the output shape before writing code (the MCP is authenticated, so this needs no key). Without the MCP, use the contract above.

Before running the app, set up these keys so it does not error at runtime:
- `ROBOFLOW_API_KEY` (sent as `api_key`) from https://app.roboflow.com/settings/api
Create a .gitignore'd .env with these variables, using placeholder values for any I haven't given you. Then pause and tell me directly, in your reply: the full path to the .env file, exactly which keys I need to paste in, and the link to get each one. Wait for me to confirm I've added them before you run anything. Do not run the app until I confirm.

Then add the integration to my codebase: match my project's language, framework, and conventions; read every key from environment variables (never hardcode); add basic error handling; and include a small runnable example. If you can't tell what language my project uses, ask me.
Installpip install inference-sdk

Deploy this workflow to your Roboflow workspace to use it.

# 1. Import the library
from inference_sdk import InferenceHTTPClient

# 2. Connect to your workflow
client = InferenceHTTPClient(
  api_url="https://serverless.roboflow.com",
  api_key="YOUR_API_KEY"
)

# 3. Run your workflow on an image
result = client.run_workflow(
  workspace_name="your-workspace",
  workflow_id="yolo-world-object-detection",
  images={
    "image": "YOUR_IMAGE.jpg"  # Path to your image file
  },
  parameters={
    "classes": ["class1", "class2", "class3"]
  },
  use_cache=True  # cache workflow definition for 15 minutes
)

# 4. Get your results
print(result)

Deploy this workflow to your Roboflow workspace to use it.

const response = await fetch('https://serverless.roboflow.com/your-workspace/workflows/yolo-world-object-detection', {
  method: 'POST',
  headers: {
    'Content-Type': 'application/json'
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({
    api_key: 'YOUR_API_KEY',
    inputs: {
      "image": {"type": "url", "value": "IMAGE_URL"},
      "classes": ["class1", "class2", "class3"]
    }
  })
});

const result = await response.json();
console.log(result);

Deploy this workflow to your Roboflow workspace to use it.

curl --location 'https://serverless.roboflow.com/your-workspace/workflows/yolo-world-object-detection' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--data '{
  "api_key": "YOUR_API_KEY",
  "inputs": {
    "image": {"type": "url", "value": "IMAGE_URL"},
    "classes": ["class1", "class2", "class3"]
  }
}'

YOLO World License

GPL-3.0 · Restrictive license

YOLO World is released under GPL-3.0, a restrictive license. The YOLO World license permits commercial use, but it requires you to open-source any code changes you make, so businesses that cannot release related code need a separate commercial license.

Commercial use
Permitted with obligations: you can sell products built on YOLO World only if you also release the corresponding source under GPL-3.0. A commercial license removes that obligation.
Modification
Permitted. Modified versions you distribute must be released under GPL-3.0, with your changes documented.
Redistribution
Permitted with the corresponding source code and the license text.

Uncertainty around licensing can delay or stop a project. If you are commercially unwilling or legally unable to open-source related code, settle the YOLO World licensing question before you build on it, not after.

Read the full GPL-3.0 license ↗

Do I need a commercial license for YOLO World?

A commercial license is a separate license which gives you the right to use YOLO World without an obligation to open-source related code changes. Roboflow plans include commercial licenses for the supported models listed on the licensing page, scoped by deployment method: Roboflow Managed Cloud on Public plans, a Self-Hosted Inference Server on Core, and deployment outside the Roboflow ecosystem on Enterprise.

Do not hesitate to reach out with questions for your commercial project — our team will help you start solving business problems on the first call. See Roboflow commercial licensing for the models included in each plan.

Talk to sales

YOLO-World is licensed under a GPL-3.0 license.

Roboflow supports deploying these models with Inference, though they require a commercial license to use without GPL restrictions.

Roboflow provides a commercial license to YOLO-World to customers with active paid subscriptions. This license applies to training and deployment through the Roboflow ecosystem (like self-hosting Inference); usage of these models outside of Roboflow is not covered.

To use YOLO-World in a commercial project without the GPL-3.0 conditions, you need a license. As a paid Roboflow customer, you automatically get access to use any YOLO-World models uploaded to our platform for commercial use. This is secured under Roboflow's sub-license agreement with the creators of YOLO-World.

If you are a free Roboflow customer, you can use YOLO-World in any way if using our serverless hosted API and can use YOLO-World models commercially self-hosted with a paid plan.

To learn more about model licensing with Roboflow, refer to our Licensing guide.

GPL-3.0 is a "copyleft" license: distributing a product that includes this model typically requires you to release your full source code under GPL-3.0.

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

Frequently Asked Questions About YOLO World Vision

YOLO World has not yet been evaluated on Roboflow's current Vision Evals. The results on this page are from the previous benchmark.

Yes. The demo on this page runs YOLO World in the free Roboflow Playground: upload an image and see results in seconds. A free account unlocks unlimited runs.