# YOLOv9: Learning What You Want to Learn Using Programmable Gradient Information

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.13616 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13616/

## Key facts

- Cited by 425 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 78 of its 80 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 78)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [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)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (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)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [Identity Mappings in Deep Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.05027/) (2016)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (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)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [Swin Transformer V2: Scaling Up Capacity and Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09883/) (2021)
- [SimMIM: A Simple Framework for Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09886/) (2021)
- [Perceiver: General Perception with Iterative Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03206/) (2021)
- [YOLOX: Exceeding YOLO Series in 2021](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08430/) (2021)
- [Vision Mamba: Efficient Visual Representation Learning with Bidirectional State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09417/) (2024)
- [YOLOv7: Trainable bag-of-freebies sets new state-of-the-art for real-time object detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02696/) (2022)
- [VMamba: Visual State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10166/) (2024)
- [Deep Learning and the Information Bottleneck Principle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02406/) (2015)
- [Path Aggregation Network for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01534/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 425)

- [YOLOv10: Real-Time End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14458/) (2024)
- [YOLOv11: An Overview of the Key Architectural Enhancements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17725/) (2024)
- [YOLOv12: Attention-Centric Real-Time Object Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12524/) (2025)
- [RT-DETRv2: Improved Baseline with Bag-of-Freebies for Real-Time Detection Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17140/) (2024)
- [YOLO26: Key Architectural Enhancements and Performance Benchmarking for Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25164/) (2025)
- [RF-DETR: Neural Architecture Search for Real-Time Detection Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.09554/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Multi-subject Open-set Personalization in Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.06187/) (2025)
- [YOLOv13: Real-Time Object Detection with Hypergraph-Enhanced Adaptive Visual Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17733/) (2025)
- [Ultralytics YOLO26: Unified Real-Time End-to-End Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03748/) (2026)
- [Make It Count: Text-to-Image Generation with an Accurate Number of Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10210/) (2024)
- [DRCT: Saving Image Super-resolution away from Information Bottleneck](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00722/) (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)
- [YOLO Evolution: A Comprehensive Benchmark and Architectural Review of YOLOv12, YOLO11, and Their Previous Versions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00201/) (2024)
- [Ultralytics YOLO Evolution: An Overview of YOLO27, YOLO26, YOLO11, YOLOv8, and YOLOv5 Object Detectors for Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.09653/) (2025)
- [Pelican: Correcting Hallucination in Vision-LLMs via Claim Decomposition and Program of Thought Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02352/) (2024)
- [The 8th AI City Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09432/) (2024)
- [UAV-DETR: Efficient End-to-End Object Detection for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01855/) (2025)
- [YOLOv8 to YOLO11: A Comprehensive Architecture In-depth Comparative Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13400/) (2025)
- [Pytorch-Wildlife: A Collaborative Deep Learning Framework for Conservation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12930/) (2024)
- [YOLOv1 to YOLOv10: A comprehensive review of YOLO variants and their application in the agricultural domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10139/) (2024)
- [FBRT-YOLO: Faster and Better for Real-Time Aerial Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.20670/) (2025)
- [Tora2: Motion and Appearance Customized Diffusion Transformer for Multi-Entity Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05963/) (2025)
- [Advanced computer vision for extracting georeferenced vehicle trajectories from drone imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02136/) (2024)
- [SICNav-Diffusion: Safe and Interactive Crowd Navigation with Diffusion Trajectory Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08858/) (2025)
- [Securing the Skies: A Comprehensive Survey on Anti-UAV Methods, Benchmarking, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11967/) (2025)
- [Unlearning Sensitive Information in Multimodal LLMs: Benchmark and Attack-Defense Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.01456/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Today's deep learning methods focus on how to design the most appropriate objective functions so that the prediction results of the model can be closest to the ground truth. Meanwhile, an appropriate architecture that can facilitate acquisition of enough information for prediction has to be designed. Existing methods ignore a fact that when input data undergoes layer-by-layer feature extraction and spatial transformation, large amount of information will be lost. This paper will delve into the important issues of data loss when data is transmitted through deep networks, namely information bottleneck and reversible functions. We proposed the concept of programmable gradient information (PGI) to cope with the various changes required by deep networks to achieve multiple objectives. PGI can provide complete input information for the target task to calculate objective function, so that reliable gradient information can be obtained to update network weights. In addition, a new lightweight network architecture -- Generalized Efficient Layer Aggregation Network (GELAN), based on gradient path planning is designed. GELAN's architecture confirms that PGI has gained superior results on lightweight models. We verified the proposed GELAN and PGI on MS COCO dataset based object detection. The results show that GELAN only uses conventional convolution operators to achieve better parameter utilization than the state-of-the-art methods developed based on depth-wise convolution. PGI can be used for variety of models from lightweight to large. It can be used to obtain complete information, so that train-from-scratch models can achieve better results than state-of-the-art models pre-trained using large datasets, the comparison results are shown in Figure 1. The source codes are at: https://github.com/WongKinYiu/yolov9.