# A Decade of You Only Look Once (YOLO) for Object Detection: A Review

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.18586 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18586/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 72 of its 418 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 72)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10934/) (2020)
- [YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08242/) (2016)
- [BDD100K: A Diverse Driving Dataset for Heterogeneous Multitask Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04687/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Path Aggregation Network for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01534/) (2018)
- [Spatial Pyramid Pooling in Deep Convolutional Networks for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.4729/) (2014)
- [Object Detection in 20 Years: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05055/) (2019)
- [Object Detection with Deep Learning: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05511/) (2018)
- [YOLOv10: Real-Time End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14458/) (2024)
- [YOLO-World: Real-Time Open-Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17270/) (2024)
- [Distance-IoU Loss: Faster and Better Learning for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08287/) (2019)
- [YOLOv9: Learning What You Want to Learn Using Programmable Gradient Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13616/) (2024)
- [Generalized Focal Loss: Learning Qualified and Distributed Bounding Boxes for Dense Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04388/) (2020)
- [A Survey of Convolutional Neural Networks: Analysis, Applications, and Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02806/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [YOLOE-26: Integrating YOLO26 with YOLOE for Real-Time Open-Vocabulary Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00168/) (2026)
- [Hardware optimization on Android for inference of AI models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13453/) (2025)
- [A Compact and Efficient 1.251 Million Parameter Machine Learning CNN Model PD36-C for Plant Disease Detection: A Case Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11332/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This review marks the tenth anniversary of You Only Look Once (YOLO), one of the most influential frameworks in real-time object detection. Over the past decade, YOLO has evolved from a streamlined detector into a diverse family of architectures characterized by efficient design, modular scalability, and cross-domain adaptability. The paper presents a technical overview of the main versions (from YOLOv1 to YOLOv13), highlights key architectural trends, and surveys the principal application areas in which YOLO has been adopted. It also addresses evaluation practices, ethical considerations, and potential future directions for the framework's continued development. The analysis aims to provide a comprehensive and critical perspective on YOLO's trajectory and ongoing transformation.