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YOLOE Overview

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.

YOLOE Details & Performance

Details

Vision Tasks

Object DetectionInstance SegmentationOpen Vocabulary Object Detection

Features

Real-Time VisionZero-shot Detection

Usage

Past 30 Days

Not available

Not in Playground

Performance

Avg. Latency

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Tencent
YOLO World
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.
Google
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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.
IDEA Research
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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.
Meta
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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.
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.

YOLOE License

AGPL-3.0 · Restrictive license

YOLOE is released under AGPL-3.0, the most restrictive of the common model licenses. AGPL-3.0 requires the user to open-source any code changes they make, including the code of any other projects that connect directly to the model, so the YOLOE license usually means a separate commercial license for business use.

Commercial use
Permitted only if you are willing and able to open-source related code. Otherwise YOLOE requires a separate commercial license — the usual path for businesses.
Modification
Permitted. Modified versions must be offered under AGPL-3.0, including to users who only ever reach the model over a network.
Redistribution
Permitted with the complete corresponding source, under the same license.

Serving YOLOE behind an API or inside a hosted product counts: AGPL-3.0 reaches the code of other projects that connect directly to the model, which is what catches most commercial deployments by surprise.

Read the full AGPL-3.0 license ↗

Do I need a commercial license for YOLOE?

In practice, using YOLOE in a commercial product or service, including one users reach over a network, means open-sourcing your application code under AGPL-3.0 or buying a commercial license. Deploying on Roboflow includes a commercial YOLOE license for every user, including the free plan; commercial self-hosting is an Enterprise add-on. Licensing details.

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.

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This model is released under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL-3.0), a strong copyleft license. Like GPL-3.0, derivative works must be released under the same license, and AGPL-3.0 extends this requirement to network deployment.

Commercial use is permitted under AGPL-3.0, but if you offer this model as part of a network service (such as a public API or web app), you must make the complete source code of your modified version available to all users of that service. Many commercial users prefer to acquire a separate license from the model authors to avoid this requirement.

AGPL-3.0 closes the "SaaS loophole" in GPL-3.0: even hosting the model behind an API counts as distribution and triggers the source-disclosure requirement.

YOLOE is released under AGPL-3.0. In practice, using it in a commercial product or service, including one users reach over a network, means open-sourcing your application code under AGPL-3.0 or buying a commercial license. Deploying on Roboflow includes a commercial YOLOE license for every user; commercial self-hosting is an Enterprise add-on (details).

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