YOLO-UniOW: Efficient Universal Open-World Object Detection

TL;DR

YOLO-UniOW is a new efficient model for open-world object detection that can recognize known categories and detect unknown objects, adapting dynamically without retraining.

Contribution

It introduces Adaptive Decision Learning and Wildcard Learning strategies, enabling efficient, versatile, and open-vocabulary object detection in real-time environments.

Findings

Achieves 34.6 AP on LVIS with 69.6 FPS

Sets new benchmarks on multiple open-world datasets

Effectively detects unknown objects and adapts to new categories

Abstract

Traditional object detection models are constrained by the limitations of closed-set datasets, detecting only categories encountered during training. While multimodal models have extended category recognition by aligning text and image modalities, they introduce significant inference overhead due to cross-modality fusion and still remain restricted by predefined vocabulary, leaving them ineffective at handling unknown objects in open-world scenarios. In this work, we introduce Universal Open-World Object Detection (Uni-OWD), a new paradigm that unifies open-vocabulary and open-world object detection tasks. To address the challenges of this setting, we propose YOLO-UniOW, a novel model that advances the boundaries of efficiency, versatility, and performance. YOLO-UniOW incorporates Adaptive Decision Learning to replace computationally expensive cross-modality fusion with lightweight alignment in the CLIP latent space, achieving efficient detection without compromising generalization. Additionally, we design a Wildcard Learning strategy that detects out-of-distribution objects as "unknown" while enabling dynamic vocabulary expansion without the need for incremental learning. This design empowers YOLO-UniOW to seamlessly adapt to new categories in open-world environments. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of YOLO-UniOW, achieving achieving 34.6 AP and 30.0 APr on LVIS with an inference speed of 69.6 FPS. The model also sets benchmarks on M-OWODB, S-OWODB, and nuScenes datasets, showcasing its unmatched performance in open-world object detection. Code and models are available at https://github.com/THU-MIG/YOLO-UniOW.