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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
THU-MIG
YOLOv12
YOLOv12 is an attention-centric real-time object detection model developed by researchers at Tsinghua University, with the arXiv paper published in February 2025 under the AGPL-3.0 license. It introduces an Area Attention module that partitions feature maps into regions and applies self-attention within each region, reducing the quadratic complexity of full self-attention while capturing long-range dependencies. It also incorporates R-ELAN for improved feature aggregation and scaled residual connections for training stability.YOLOv12-L achieves 54.0% AP on COCO, while the YOLOv12-N variant achieves 40.5% mAP at 1.62ms latency on an NVIDIA T4 GPU. The model is built on the Ultralytics codebase, supporting detection, segmentation, and other standard YOLO tasks at competitive real-time speeds.

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?

A commercial license is a separate license which gives you the right to use YOLOE 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.

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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.

To use YOLOE in a commercial project without the AGPL-3.0 conditions, you need a commercial license. As a paid Roboflow customer, you're automatically granted commercial-use rights for YOLOE models trained on or uploaded to our platform. See the Roboflow Licensing guide for the deployment-method by plan matrix.

If you're a free Roboflow customer, you can use YOLOE through our serverless hosted API at no cost. Self-hosted commercial use requires a paid plan.

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