  The You Only Look Once (YOLO) series of detectors have established themselves
as efficient and practical tools. However, their reliance on predefined and
trained object categories limits their applicability in open scenarios.
Addressing this limitation, we introduce YOLO-World, an innovative approach
that enhances YOLO with open-vocabulary detection capabilities through
vision-language modeling and pre-training on large-scale datasets.
Specifically, we propose a new Re-parameterizable Vision-Language Path
Aggregation Network (RepVL-PAN) and region-text contrastive loss to facilitate
the interaction between visual and linguistic information. Our method excels in
detecting a wide range of objects in a zero-shot manner with high efficiency.
On the challenging LVIS dataset, YOLO-World achieves 35.4 AP with 52.0 FPS on
V100, which outperforms many state-of-the-art methods in terms of both accuracy
and speed. Furthermore, the fine-tuned YOLO-World achieves remarkable
performance on several downstream tasks, including object detection and
open-vocabulary instance segmentation.
