mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

A Comprehensive Review of YOLO Architectures in Computer Vision: From YOLOv1 to YOLOv8 and YOLO-NAS

arXiv 2304.00501 ↗First posted 2 Apr 2023cs.CVcited by 151

Not on the map. Why?

Abstract (arXiv)

YOLO has become a central real-time object detection system for robotics, driverless cars, and video monitoring applications. We present a comprehensive analysis of YOLO's evolution, examining the innovations and contributions in each iteration from the original YOLO up to YOLOv8, YOLO-NAS, and YOLO with Transformers. We start by describing the standard metrics and postprocessing; then, we discuss the major changes in network architecture and training tricks for each model. Finally, we summarize the essential lessons from YOLO's development and provide a perspective on its future, highlighting potential research directions to enhance real-time object detection systems.

Key facts. Cited by 151 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 78 of its 160 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Apr 2023.

Builds on

78 of 160 references.

References · 78

  1. 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 60,361
  2. 2015Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognitioncited by 52,096
  3. 2020An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scalecited by 30,186
  4. 2014Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Contextcited by 17,608
  5. 2015Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networkscited by 9,639
  6. 2014ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challengecited by 8,498
  7. 2020End-to-End Object Detection with Transformerscited by 7,414
  8. 2017Mask R-CNNcited by 7,277
  9. 2015Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shiftcited by 7,005
  10. 2016Densely Connected Convolutional Networkscited by 6,720
  11. 2019EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networkscited by 6,442
  12. 2015Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Visioncited by 5,475
38 more
  1. 2017mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimizationcited by 5,183
  2. 2016SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restartscited by 5,045
  3. 2016Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detectioncited by 5,036
  4. 2015You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detectioncited by 4,852
  5. 2014Going Deeper with Convolutionscited by 4,241
  6. 2015Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classificationcited by 3,611
  7. 2016Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)cited by 3,502
  8. 2016DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFscited by 3,241
  9. 2015SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detectorcited by 3,130
  10. 2015Fast R-CNNcited by 2,933
  11. 2018YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvementcited by 2,659
  12. 2016Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networkscited by 2,546
  13. 2018CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Modulecited by 2,477
  14. 2013Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentationcited by 2,162
  15. 2020YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detectioncited by 1,630
  16. 2019FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detectioncited by 1,577
  17. 2017Deformable Convolutional Networkscited by 1,488
  18. 2016YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Strongercited by 1,431
  19. 2019Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regressioncited by 1,368
  20. 2021YOLOX: Exceeding YOLO Series in 2021cited by 1,071
  21. 2019EfficientDet: Scalable and Efficient Object Detectioncited by 1,020
  22. 2022YOLOv7: Trainable bag-of-freebies sets new state-of-the-art for real-time object detectorscited by 982
  23. 2018Path Aggregation Network for Instance Segmentationcited by 798
  24. 2018CornerNet: Detecting Objects as Paired Keypointscited by 763
  25. 2014Spatial Pyramid Pooling in Deep Convolutional Networks for Visual Recognitioncited by 720
  26. 2019CenterNet: Keypoint Triplets for Object Detectioncited by 654
  27. 2017DOTA: A Large-scale Dataset for Object Detection in Aerial Imagescited by 623
  28. 2013Network In Networkcited by 605
  29. 2020Simple Copy-Paste is a Strong Data Augmentation Method for Instance Segmentationcited by 596
  30. 2018Albumentations: fast and flexible image augmentationscited by 560
  31. 2021RepVGG: Making VGG-style ConvNets Great Againcited by 522
  32. 2019Distance-IoU Loss: Faster and Better Learning for Bounding Box Regressioncited by 459
  33. 2020Generalized Focal Loss: Learning Qualified and Distributed Bounding Boxes for Dense Object Detectioncited by 409
  34. 2017Soft-NMS -- Improving Object Detection With One Line of Codecited by 382
  35. 2019CSPNet: A New Backbone that can Enhance Learning Capability of CNNcited by 381
  36. 2018An Intriguing Failing of Convolutional Neural Networks and the CoordConv Solutioncited by 307
  37. 2022YOLOv6: A Single-Stage Object Detection Framework for Industrial Applicationscited by 275
  38. 2018DropBlock: A regularization method for convolutional networkscited by 262

50 most cited of 78 All 78 (JSON)

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2023: 5; 2024: 44; 2025: 67; 2026: 35.

151 papers.

Sort:

By area:

  1. 2024YOLO advances to its genesis: a decadal and comprehensive review of the You Only Look Once (YOLO) seriescited by 22
  2. 2024Data-Centric Evolution in Autonomous Driving: A Comprehensive Survey of Big Data System, Data Mining, and Closed-Loop Technologiescited by 17
  3. 2024A Comprehensive Survey of Convolutions in Deep Learning: Applications, Challenges, and Future Trendscited by 16
  4. 2025YOLOv8 to YOLO11: A Comprehensive Architecture In-depth Comparative Reviewcited by 15
  5. 2025RoboDexVLM: Visual Language Model-Enabled Task Planning and Motion Control for Dexterous Robot Manipulationcited by 15
  6. 2024Hybrid Reasoning Based on Large Language Models for Autonomous Car Drivingcited by 11
  7. 2023Leveraging Model Fusion for Improved License Plate Recognitioncited by 10
  8. 2024A Recurrent YOLOv8-based framework for Event-Based Object Detectioncited by 9
  9. 2025The Coralscapes Dataset: Semantic Scene Understanding in Coral Reefscited by 9
  10. 2023FedAIoT: A Federated Learning Benchmark for Artificial Intelligence of Thingscited by 8
  11. 2024Enhanced Self-Checkout System for Retail Based on Improved YOLOv10cited by 7
  12. 2025Improving Small Drone Detection Through Multi-Scale Processing and Data Augmentationcited by 7
38 more
  1. 2024Upsampling DINOv2 features for unsupervised vision tasks and weakly supervised materials segmentationcited by 6
  2. 2023YOLOBench: Benchmarking Efficient Object Detectors on Embedded Systemscited by 5
  3. 2024NuSegDG: Integration of Heterogeneous Space and Gaussian Kernel for Domain-Generalized Nuclei Segmentationcited by 5
  4. 2025Robust Vision-Based Runway Detection through Conformal Prediction and Conformal mAPcited by 5
  5. 2023UnifiedVisionGPT: Streamlining Vision-Oriented AI through Generalized Multimodal Frameworkcited by 4
  6. 2024End-to-end information extraction in handwritten documents: Understanding Paris marriage records from 1880 to 1940cited by 4
  7. 2024R2Det: Exploring Relaxed Rotation Equivariance in 2D object detectioncited by 4
  8. 2024Evaluation and Comparison of Visual Language Models for Transportation Engineering Problemscited by 4
  9. 2024Breaking the Illusion: Real-world Challenges for Adversarial Patches in Object Detectioncited by 4
  10. 2025Deep Learning-Based Multi-Object Tracking: A Comprehensive Survey from Foundations to State-of-the-Artcited by 4
  11. 2025Venus: An Efficient Edge Memory-and-Retrieval System for VLM-based Online Video Understandingcited by 4
  12. 2025GorillaWatch: An Automated System for In-the-Wild Gorilla Re-Identification and Population Monitoringcited by 4
  13. 2026ICPR 2026 Competition on Low-Resolution License Plate Recognitioncited by 4
  14. 2024Surround-View Fisheye Optics in Computer Vision and Simulation: Survey and Challengescited by 3
  15. 2024Performance Evaluation of Semi-supervised Learning Frameworks for Multi-Class Weed Detectioncited by 3
  16. 2024Weakly Supervised Intracranial Hemorrhage Segmentation with YOLO and an Uncertainty Rectified Segment Anything Modelcited by 3
  17. 2024Fall Detection for Industrial Setups Using YOLOv8 Variantscited by 3
  18. 2024Generative AI-based Pipeline Architecture for Increasing Training Efficiency in Intelligent Weed Control Systemscited by 3
  19. 2024SAMIC: Segment Anything with In-Context Spatial Prompt Engineeringcited by 3
  20. 2025A Decade of You Only Look Once (YOLO) for Object Detection: A Reviewcited by 3
  21. 2025Object detection in adverse weather conditions for autonomous vehicles using Instruct Pix2Pixcited by 3
  22. 2025Effective Damage Data Generation by Fusing Imagery with Human Knowledge Using Vision-Language Modelscited by 3
  23. 2025Object-aware graph matching network for cross-domain remote sensing image localizationcited by 3
  24. 2026A Multi-Task Deep Learning Framework for Real-Time Intelligent Video Surveillance with Temporal Event Validationcited by 3
  25. 2024Towards Improved Semiconductor Defect Inspection for high-NA EUVL based on SEMI-SuperYOLO-NAScited by 2
  26. 2024FedPylot: Navigating Federated Learning for Real-Time Object Detection in Internet of Vehiclescited by 2
  27. 2024Distributed Intelligent Video Surveillance for Early Armed Robbery Detection based on Deep Learningcited by 2
  28. 2024On the Black-box Explainability of Object Detection Models for Safe and Trustworthy Industrial Applicationscited by 2
  29. 2025MoENAS: Mixture-of-Expert based Neural Architecture Search for jointly Accurate, Fair, and Robust Edge Deep Neural Networkscited by 2
  30. 2025Amnesia as a Catalyst for Enhancing Black Box Pixel Attacks in Image Classification and Object Detectioncited by 2
  31. 2025Self-Adaptive Gamma Context-Aware SSM-based Model for Metal Defect Detectioncited by 2
  32. 2025Inland Waterway Object Detection in Multi-environment: Dataset and Approachcited by 2
  33. 2025A Novel Multi-layer Task-centric and Data Quality Framework for Autonomous Drivingcited by 2
  34. 2025Human Scanpath Prediction in Target-Present Visual Search with Semantic-Foveal Bayesian Attentioncited by 2
  35. 2025AlphaDent: A dataset for automated tooth pathology detectioncited by 2
  36. 2024Agricultural Object Detection with You Look Only Once (YOLO) Algorithm: A Bibliometric and Systematic Literature Reviewcited by 1
  37. 2024Object Depth and Size Estimation using Stereo-vision and Integration with SLAMcited by 1
  38. 2024Automated Detection of Defects on Metal Surfaces using Vision Transformerscited by 1

50 most cited of 151 All 151 (JSON)