# Gold-YOLO: Efficient Object Detector via Gather-and-Distribute Mechanism

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.11331 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11331/

## Key facts

- Cited by 51 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 55 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [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)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [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)
- [YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08242/) (2016)
- [DINO: DETR with Improved DeNoising Anchor Boxes for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03605/) (2022)
- [ShuffleNet: An Extremely Efficient Convolutional Neural Network for Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.01083/) (2017)
- [SimMIM: A Simple Framework for Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09886/) (2021)
- [YOLOX: Exceeding YOLO Series in 2021](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08430/) (2021)
- [EfficientDet: Scalable and Efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09070/) (2019)
- [YOLOv7: Trainable bag-of-freebies sets new state-of-the-art for real-time object detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02696/) (2022)
- [ConvNeXt V2: Co-designing and Scaling ConvNets with Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00808/) (2023)
- [Large Batch Optimization for Deep Learning: Training BERT in 76 minutes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00962/) (2019)
- [CenterNet: Keypoint Triplets for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08189/) (2019)
- [A Survey on Visual Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12556/) (2020)
- [Transformer in Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00112/) (2021)
- [DETRs Beat YOLOs on Real-time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08069/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [YOLOv10: Real-Time End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14458/) (2024)
- [YOLOv9: Learning What You Want to Learn Using Programmable Gradient Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13616/) (2024)
- [YOLOv12: Attention-Centric Real-Time Object Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12524/) (2025)
- [One-for-All: Bridge the Gap Between Heterogeneous Architectures in Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19444/) (2023)
- [D-FINE: Redefine Regression Task in DETRs as Fine-grained Distribution Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13842/) (2024)
- [DEIM: DETR with Improved Matching for Fast Convergence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04234/) (2024)
- [YOLOv13: Real-Time Object Detection with Hypergraph-Enhanced Adaptive Visual Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17733/) (2025)
- [LW-DETR: A Transformer Replacement to YOLO for Real-Time Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03459/) (2024)
- [RT-DETRv3: Real-time End-to-End Object Detection with Hierarchical Dense Positive Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08475/) (2024)
- [Hyper-YOLO: When Visual Object Detection Meets Hypergraph Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04804/) (2024)
- [Real-Time Object Detection Meets DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20787/) (2025)
- [Mamba YOLO: A Simple Baseline for Object Detection with State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05835/) (2024)
- [EfficientViM: Efficient Vision Mamba with Hidden State Mixer based State Space Duality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15241/) (2024)
- [YOLOv1 to YOLOv10: The fastest and most accurate real-time object detection systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09332/) (2024)
- [YOLO-TS: Real-Time Traffic Sign Detection with Enhanced Accuracy Using Optimized Receptive Fields and Anchor-Free Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17144/) (2024)
- [Vision Mamba in Remote Sensing: A Comprehensive Survey of Techniques, Applications and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00630/) (2025)
- [Dome-DETR: DETR with Density-Oriented Feature-Query Manipulation for Efficient Tiny Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05741/) (2025)
- [Multi-Branch Auxiliary Fusion YOLO with Re-parameterization Heterogeneous Convolutional for accurate object detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04381/) (2024)
- [MHAF-YOLO: Multi-Branch Heterogeneous Auxiliary Fusion YOLO for accurate object detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04656/) (2025)
- [SoftHGNN: Soft Hypergraph Neural Networks for General Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15325/) (2025)
- [Butter: Frequency Consistency and Hierarchical Fusion for Autonomous Driving Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13373/) (2025)
- [LSM-YOLO: A Compact and Effective ROI Detector for Medical Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14087/) (2024)
- [Real-Time Detection for Small UAVs: Combining YOLO and Multi-frame Motion Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02582/) (2024)
- [YOLO-LLTS: Real-Time Low-Light Traffic Sign Detection via Prior-Guided Enhancement and Multibranch Feature Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13883/) (2025)
- [Inland Waterway Object Detection in Multi-environment: Dataset and Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04835/) (2025)
- [YOLO-TLA: An Efficient and Lightweight Small Object Detection Model based on YOLOv5](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14309/) (2024)
- [Synchronized Object Detection for Autonomous Sorting, Mapping, and Quantification of Materials in Circular Healthcare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06821/) (2024)
- [DASSF: Dynamic-Attention Scale-Sequence Fusion for Aerial Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12285/) (2024)
- [FA-YOLO: Research On Efficient Feature Selection YOLO Improved Algorithm Based On FMDS and AGMF Modules](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16313/) (2024)
- [Differential Evolution Integrated Hybrid Deep Learning Model for Object Detection in Pre-made Dishes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20370/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In the past years, YOLO-series models have emerged as the leading approaches in the area of real-time object detection. Many studies pushed up the baseline to a higher level by modifying the architecture, augmenting data and designing new losses. However, we find previous models still suffer from information fusion problem, although Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) and Path Aggregation Network (PANet) have alleviated this. Therefore, this study provides an advanced Gatherand-Distribute mechanism (GD) mechanism, which is realized with convolution and self-attention operations. This new designed model named as Gold-YOLO, which boosts the multi-scale feature fusion capabilities and achieves an ideal balance between latency and accuracy across all model scales. Additionally, we implement MAE-style pretraining in the YOLO-series for the first time, allowing YOLOseries models could be to benefit from unsupervised pretraining. Gold-YOLO-N attains an outstanding 39.9% AP on the COCO val2017 datasets and 1030 FPS on a T4 GPU, which outperforms the previous SOTA model YOLOv6-3.0-N with similar FPS by +2.4%. The PyTorch code is available at https://github.com/huawei-noah/Efficient-Computing/tree/master/Detection/Gold-YOLO, and the MindSpore code is available at https://gitee.com/mindspore/models/tree/master/research/cv/Gold_YOLO.