YOLOv12

YOLOv12: Attention-Centric Real-Time Object Detectors

Yunjie Tian¹, Qixiang Ye², David Doermann¹

¹ University at Buffalo, SUNY, ² University of Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Comparison with popular methods in terms of latency-accuracy (left) and FLOPs-accuracy (right) trade-offs

Updates

• 2025/02/20: Any computer or edge device?. Support yolov12 now.

• 2025/02/20: ONNX CPP Version. Train a yolov12 model on a custom dataset?

• 2025/02/19: arXiv version is public. Demo is available.

Abstract

Enhancing the network architecture of the YOLO framework has been crucial for a long time but has focused on CNN-based improvements despite the proven superiority of attention mechanisms in modeling capabilities. This is because attention-based models cannot match the speed of CNN-based models. This paper proposes an attention-centric YOLO framework, namely YOLOv12, that matches the speed of previous CNN-based ones while harnessing the performance benefits of attention mechanisms.

YOLOv12 surpasses all popular real-time object detectors in accuracy with competitive speed. For example, YOLOv12-N achieves 40.6% mAP with an inference latency of 1.64 ms on a T4 GPU, outperforming advanced YOLOv10-N / YOLOv11-N by 2.1%/1.2% mAP with a comparable speed. This advantage extends to other model scales. YOLOv12 also surpasses end-to-end real-time detectors that improve DETR, such as RT-DETR / RT-DETRv2: YOLOv12-S beats RT-DETR-R18 / RT-DETRv2-R18 while running 42% faster, using only 36% of the computation and 45% of the parameters.

Main Results

Model	size (pixels)	mAPval 50-95	Speed T4 TensorRT10	params (M)	FLOPs (G)
YOLO12n	640	40.6	1.64	2.6	6.5
YOLO12s	640	48.0	2.61	9.3	21.4
YOLO12m	640	52.5	4.86	20.2	67.5
YOLO12l	640	53.7	6.77	26.4	88.9
YOLO12x	640	55.2	11.79	59.1	199.0

Installation

wget https://github.com/Dao-AILab/flash-attention/releases/download/v2.7.3/flash_attn-2.7.3+cu11torch2.2cxx11abiFALSE-cp311-cp311-linux_x86_64.whl
conda create -n yolov12 python=3.11
conda activate yolov12
pip install -r requirements.txt
pip install -e .

Validation

yolov12n yolov12s yolov12m yolov12l yolov12x

from ultralytics import YOLO

model = YOLO('yolov12{n/s/m/l/x}.pt')
model.val(data='coco.yaml', save_json=True)

Training

from ultralytics import YOLO

model = YOLO('yolov12n.yaml')

# Train the model
results = model.train(
  data='coco.yaml',
  epochs=600, 
  batch=256, 
  imgsz=640,
  scale=0.5,  # S:0.9; M:0.9; L:0.9; X:0.9
  mosaic=1.0,
  mixup=0.0,  # S:0.05; M:0.15; L:0.15; X:0.2
  copy_paste=0.1,  # S:0.15; M:0.4; L:0.5; X:0.6
  device="0,1,2,3",
)

# Evaluate model performance on the validation set
metrics = model.val()

# Perform object detection on an image
results = model("path/to/image.jpg")
results[0].show()

Prediction

from ultralytics import YOLO

model = YOLO('yolov12{n/s/m/l/x}.pt')
model.predict()

Export

from ultralytics import YOLO

model = YOLO('yolov12{n/s/m/l/x}.pt')
model.export(format="engine", half=True)  # or format="onnx"

Demo

python app.py
# Please visit http://127.0.0.1:7860

Acknowledgement

The code is based on ultralytics. Thanks for their excellent work!

Citation

@article{tian2025yolov12,
  title={YOLOv12: Attention-Centric Real-Time Object Detectors},
  author={Tian, Yunjie and Ye, Qixiang and Doermann, David},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.12524},
  year={2025}
}