Input Resolution Matters: Real-Time Object Detection Latency

Real-time vision demands models that are accurate, efficient, and simple to deploy across diverse hardware. The YOLO family has become widely deployed for this reason, yet most YOLO detectors still rely on non-maximum suppression at inference, carry heavy detection heads due to Distribution Focal Loss, require long training schedules, and can leave the smallest objects without positive label assignments. We present Ultralytics YOLO26, a unified real-time vision model family that addresses these limitations through coordinated architecture and training advances. YOLO26 uses a dual-head design for native NMS-free end-to-end inference and removes DFL entirely, yielding a lighter head with unconstrained regression range. Its training pipeline combines MuSGD, a hybrid Muon-SGD optimizer adapted from large language model training; Progressive Loss, which shifts supervision toward the inference-time head; and STAL, a label assignment strategy that guarantees positive coverage for small objects. Beyond detection, YOLO26 introduces task-specific head and loss designs for instance segmentation, pose estimation, and oriented detection, producing consistent gains across tasks and scales. The family spans five scales (n/s/m/l/x) and supports detection, instance segmentation, pose estimation, classification, and oriented detection in a single pipeline, with an open-vocabulary extension, YOLOE-26, for text-, visual-, and prompt-free inference. Across all scales, YOLO26 achieves 40.9-57.5 mAP on COCO at 1.7-11.8 ms T4 TensorRT latency, advancing the accuracy-latency Pareto front over prior real-time detectors, while YOLOE-26x reaches 40.6 AP on LVIS minival under text prompting. Code and models are available at https://github.com/ultralytics/ultralytics.

Making tradeoffs between execution latency and result utility (i.e., anytime computing) for adapting to dynamic operational requirements has been shown to enhance the performance of cyber-physical systems. In this work, we focus on enabling anytime computing for deep neural networks (DNNs) that process LiDAR point clouds for 3D object detection. We propose a novel method that enables multi-resolution inference for models that process point clouds as pillars or voxels, allowing the input to be dynamically scaled and processed at the resolution needed to meet timing requirements. Importantly, our memory-efficient approach requires the deployment of only a single DNN model, avoiding the need to deploy multiple models, each trained for a different input resolution. We also introduce a deadline-aware scheduler that selects the highest possible resolution for any given input by accurately predicting the execution time for all possible resolutions at runtime, which is challenging due to the irregularity of LiDAR point clouds. Experimental results on the nuScenes autonomous driving dataset demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing anytime computing approaches for LiDAR object detection. Finally, we deploy our approach in a simulated autonomous driving system, where it consistently enables collision-free navigation while avoiding unnecessary stalls caused by environmental complexity.

Event cameras promise low-latency perception for high-speed robotic systems, where even short delays can render detections stale by the time they inform downstream robotic decisions. Yet modern event detectors still require tens of milliseconds of computation before their predictions become available. Conventional evaluation ignores this delay by comparing predictions with annotations at the observation timestamp, even though the scene may have changed by the time those predictions are produced. We study this observation-availability mismatch in event-based multi-object detection and show that state-of-the-art event detectors degrade substantially when evaluated at prediction availability rather than observation time. To address this, we introduce ChronoFuse, a causal availability-time detector that predicts object states for when its output becomes available rather than for when its input was observed. ChronoFuse performs causal cross-time fusion over a multi-scale feature hierarchy, combining current representations with cached temporal features to expose short-term temporal cues without using future observations. The fusion pathway is lightweight, adding only 0.17 million parameters and 0.84 ms of mean end-to-end latency overhead. ChronoFuse recovers 71% of the accuracy lost to latency on 1Mpx driving data and 90.8% under rapid drone motion on FRED, nearly restoring zero-delay performance. Under the extreme motion of EV-Flying, ChronoFuse reaches 20.95 sAP, compared with 2.25 for the strongest standard event detector (9.3x gain). These results show that predicting ahead can be critical for robots operating in fast-changing scenes, including autonomous driving, agile flight, and robotic interception.