Cognitive-YOLO: LLM-Driven Architecture Synthesis from First Principles of Data for Object Detection

General-purpose object detection algorithms face a domain-shift bottleneck when deployed in vertical scenarios, and manually customizing a network architecture relies heavily on expert experience with high trial-and-error cost. To address these problems, we present Cognitive-YOLO, an adaptive object-detection model synthesis system driven by a large language model (LLM) collaborating with an autonomous agent. Cognitive-YOLO builds a fully automated Analyze--Synthesize--Compile pipeline. First, a data-profiling module quantitatively extracts dataset features, guiding a ReAct-paradigm agent to autonomously retrieve matching network modules from a curated component library. Second, the LLM performs logical reasoning and topological assembly conditioned on the data features, producing a specification-compliant neural architecture description. Finally, a backend hybrid compiler dynamically instantiates the model, closing the loop with end-to-end training and evaluation scheduling. Cross-validation on datasets including rail-surface defects and rice diseases shows that the lightweight models synthesized by Cognitive-YOLO markedly compress the parameter count (down to 1.9M) while matching or surpassing mainstream baselines such as YOLOv11n in [email protected]:0.95, effectively balancing model compactness and feature-representation capability.