Fine-tuned YOLOv11x object detector on the ExDark benchmark dataset, trained and evaluated as part of DetectionBench -- a framework for reproducibly benchmarking modern object detectors with identical training recipes and evaluation metrics across multiple real-world datasets.
Metrics reported in this model card are computed on the ExDark test split, using DetectionBench's standard evaluation pipeline (detectionbench-evaluate).
ExDark Model Zoo
Every model DetectionBench has trained and evaluated on ExDark so far, for full transparency -- see DetectionBench for the smaller, curated comparison set used on the project README.
Model
mAP@50
mAP@50-95
Precision
Recall
RF-DETR Small
88.98
61.67
83.07
81.89
RF-DETR Medium
88.64
62.55
86.6
79.46
RF-DETR Nano
85.27
58.01
85.18
74.67
YOLOv26l
77.51
50.88
80.71
70.72
YOLOv26m
76.54
50.02
82.29
68.83
YOLOv8x
75.4
48.39
81.53
65.86
YOLOv8l
75.26
48.48
81.44
67.58
YOLOv8m
74.69
48.05
78.4
69.17
YOLOv11x
74.41
48.98
81.87
67.05
YOLOv9m
74.17
47.38
76.27
67.94
YOLOv26s
74.0
48.32
79.11
65.59
YOLOv11l
73.44
47.56
78.57
67.09
YOLOv11s
73.35
46.8
77.93
66.38
YOLOv11m
73.17
47.16
74.83
67.23
YOLOv8s
73.01
45.85
78.26
65.13
YOLOv26n
72.7
46.27
81.0
62.67
YOLOv8n
71.29
44.78
78.25
62.76
YOLOv11n
70.36
44.72
76.18
61.15
Per-Class Performance
Class
mAP@50
mAP@50-95
Bicycle
75.32
53.82
Boat
74.21
42.09
Bottle
66.41
43.59
Bus
87.2
67.47
Car
81.1
56.01
Cat
80.31
54.63
Chair
58.88
35.13
Cup
76.64
50.12
Dog
76.82
52.74
Motorbike
82.09
49.94
People
75.13
42.93
Table
58.84
39.29
Evaluation Visualizations
Precision-Recall Curve
PR Curve
F1 Curve
F1 Curve
Confusion Matrix
Confusion Matrix
Dataset
This model was trained on ExDark. For the full dataset description, provenance, license, and citation, see the dataset card:
DetectionBench -- reproducible benchmarks for modern object detectors on real-world datasets
Training Framework
This model was trained using DetectionBench, an open-source framework for benchmarking object detectors across multiple real-world datasets with a common pipeline.
Features include:
A dataset-adapter registry for converting real-world datasets into a canonical format
Identical training/evaluation recipes across model families (Ultralytics YOLO/RT-DETR, RF-DETR)
One-command reproducibility via versioned Hydra configs
If you find this model useful, please consider starring the repository.
Known Limitations
Severe class imbalance: People accounts for roughly 46% of all annotated boxes while Bus is the rarest class, so per-class accuracy on rare classes is measured on very few test examples and should be read with wide uncertainty.
Small dataset overall (7,344 images, 734 in the test split, across 12 classes) -- limited training signal for several classes independent of the imbalance above.
Two-hop provenance: this dataset was converted to YOLO format by a third-party Roboflow export before reaching DetectionBench, not sourced directly from the original per-class-folder release; images are pre-resized to 640x640 by that export.
The original authors separately request non-commercial use of this dataset (beyond the BSD-3-Clause license text itself) -- this applies to any model trained on it, not only the raw images.
Citation
If you use this model in your research, please consider citing:
The ExDark dataset (see below)
The original YOLOv11x architecture (see below)
The other model architectures shown in the Model Zoo/External Comparison tables above, if you reference their results
DetectionBench, the training/evaluation framework used to produce this checkpoint
@article{Exdark,
title = {Getting to Know Low-light Images with The Exclusively Dark Dataset},
author = {Loh, Yuen Peng and Chan, Chee Seng},
journal = {Computer Vision and Image Understanding},
volume = {178},
pages = {30-42},
year = {2019},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cviu.2018.10.010}
}
bibtex
1No official YOLO11 research paper has been published by Ultralytics; the most commonly cited independent architectural analysis is used instead:
23@article{khanam2024yolov11,
4 title={YOLOv11: An Overview of the Key Architectural Enhancements},
5 author={Khanam, Rahima and Hussain, Muhammad},
6 journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.17725},
7 year={2024}
8}
Other architectures compared against on ExDark in this model card:
RF-DETR
bibtex
1@inproceedings{robinson2026rfdetr,
2 title = {RF-DETR: Real-Time Detection Transformer},
3 author = {Robinson, Isaac and Robicheaux, Peter and Popov, Matvei and Ramanan, Deva and Peri, Neehar},
4 booktitle = {International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
5 year = {2026},
6 url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09554}
7}
89@article{oquab2023dinov2,
10 title={DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision},
11 author={Oquab, Maxime and Darcet, Timoth{\'e}e and Moutakanni, Theo and Vo, Huy and Szafraniec, Marc and Khalidov, Vasil and Fernandez, Pierre and Haziza, Daniel and Massa, Francisco and El-Nouby, Alaaeldin and others},
12 journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.07193},
13 year={2023}
14}
YOLOv26
bibtex
1@article{jocher2026yolo26,
2 title={Ultralytics YOLO26: Unified Real-Time End-to-End Vision Models},
3 author={Jocher, Glenn and Qiu, Jing and Liu, Mengyu and Lyu, Shuai and Akyon, Fatih Cagatay and Kalfaoglu, Muhammet Esat},
4 journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.03748},
5 year={2026}
6}
YOLOv8
bibtex
1No official YOLOv8 research paper has been published by Ultralytics; this is their own recommended software citation instead:
23@software{jocher2023yolov8,
4 author = {Glenn Jocher and Ayush Chaurasia and Jing Qiu},
5 title = {Ultralytics YOLOv8},
6 version = {8.0.0},
7 year = {2023},
8 url = {https://github.com/ultralytics/ultralytics},
9 license = {AGPL-3.0}
10}
YOLOv9
bibtex
1@article{wang2024yolov9,
2 title={YOLOv9: Learning What You Want to Learn Using Programmable Gradient Information},
3 author={Wang, Chien-Yao and Yeh, I-Hau and Liao, Hong-Yuan Mark},
4 journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.13616},
5 year={2024}
6}
bibtex
1@software{Saksena_DetectionBench_2026,
2 author = {Saksena, Saumya Kumaar},
3 title = {DetectionBench: Reproducible Benchmarks for Modern Object Detectors on Real-World Datasets},
4 url = {https://github.com/dronefreak/DetectionBench},
5 year = {2026}
6}