# You Only Look One-level Feature

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.09460 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09460/

## Key facts

- Cited by 116 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10934/) (2020)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [Group Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08494/) (2018)
- [Accurate, Large Minibatch SGD: Training ImageNet in 1 Hour](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02677/) (2017)
- [YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08242/) (2016)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00726/) (2017)
- [Objects as Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07850/) (2019)
- [Multi-Scale Context Aggregation by Dilated Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07122/) (2015)
- [EfficientDet: Scalable and Efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09070/) (2019)
- [Path Aggregation Network for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01534/) (2018)
- [CornerNet: Detecting Objects as Paired Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01244/) (2018)
- [Focal Loss for Dense Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02002/) (2017)
- [CenterNet: Keypoint Triplets for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08189/) (2019)
- [Bridging the Gap Between Anchor-based and Anchor-free Detection via Adaptive Training Sample Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02424/) (2019)
- [Empirical Evaluation of Rectified Activations in Convolutional Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00853/) (2015)
- [Hybrid Task Cascade for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07518/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 116)

- [YOLOX: Exceeding YOLO Series in 2021](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08430/) (2021)
- [Exploring Plain Vision Transformer Backbones for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16527/) (2022)
- [Group DETR: Fast DETR Training with Group-Wise One-to-Many Assignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13085/) (2022)
- [Rethinking Efficient Lane Detection via Curve Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02431/) (2022)
- [Sparse Instance Activation for Real-Time Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12827/) (2022)
- [PODA: Prompt-driven Zero-shot Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03241/) (2022)
- [PillarNeXt: Rethinking Network Designs for 3D Object Detection in LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04925/) (2023)
- [RelationTrack: Relation-aware Multiple Object Tracking with Decoupled Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04322/) (2021)
- [RFLA: Gaussian Receptive Field based Label Assignment for Tiny Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08738/) (2022)
- [Gold-YOLO: Efficient Object Detector via Gather-and-Distribute Mechanism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11331/) (2023)
- [NMS Strikes Back](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06137/) (2022)
- [FOVEA: Foveated Image Magnification for Autonomous Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12102/) (2021)
- [Anchor DETR: Query Design for Transformer-Based Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07107/) (2021)
- [Point2RBox: Combine Knowledge from Synthetic Visual Patterns for End-to-end Oriented Object Detection with Single Point Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14758/) (2023)
- [REAP: A Large-Scale Realistic Adversarial Patch Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05680/) (2022)
- [Efficient Visual Computing with Camera RAW Snapshots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07778/) (2022)
- [Improving Object Detection by Label Assignment Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10520/) (2021)
- [MAE-DET: Revisiting Maximum Entropy Principle in Zero-Shot NAS for Efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13336/) (2021)
- [MMNet: Multi-Collaboration and Multi-Supervision Network for Sequential Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02733/) (2023)
- [A Guide to Image and Video based Small Object Detection using Deep Learning : Case Study of Maritime Surveillance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12926/) (2022)
- [Centralized Feature Pyramid for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02093/) (2022)
- [HEAD: HEtero-Assists Distillation for Heterogeneous Object Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05345/) (2022)
- [You Should Look at All Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07889/) (2022)
- [Optimal Correction Cost for Object Detection Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14438/) (2022)
- [Domain generalization in deep learning-based mass detection in mammography: A large-scale multi-center study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11620/) (2022)
- [Object Detection in Hyperspectral Image via Unified Spectral-Spatial Feature Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08370/) (2023)
- [MPDIoU: A Loss for Efficient and Accurate Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07662/) (2023)
- [USIS16K: High-Quality Dataset for Underwater Salient Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19472/) (2025)
- [Background Semantics Matter: Cross-Task Feature Exchange Network for Clustered Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20078/) (2024)
- [Deep Learning for Logo Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04399/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper revisits feature pyramids networks (FPN) for one-stage detectors and points out that the success of FPN is due to its divide-and-conquer solution to the optimization problem in object detection rather than multi-scale feature fusion. From the perspective of optimization, we introduce an alternative way to address the problem instead of adopting the complex feature pyramids - em utilizing only one-level feature for detection. Based on the simple and efficient solution, we present You Only Look One-level Feature (YOLOF). In our method, two key components, Dilated Encoder and Uniform Matching, are proposed and bring considerable improvements. Extensive experiments on the COCO benchmark prove the effectiveness of the proposed model. Our YOLOF achieves comparable results with its feature pyramids counterpart RetinaNet while being 2.5× faster. Without transformer layers, YOLOF can match the performance of DETR in a single-level feature manner with 7× less training epochs. With an image size of 608×608, YOLOF achieves 44.3 mAP running at 60 fps on 2080Ti, which is 13% faster than YOLOv4. Code is available at urlhttps://github.com/megvii-model/YOLOF.