Citation

Citing LibreYOLO

The repository publishes its citation metadata as CITATION.cff, not as a BibTeX block. GitHub reads that file and offers a Cite this repository button on the repository page, which generates APA and BibTeX from it. Take the entry from there rather than typing one.

The file in full:

cff-version: 1.2.0message: "If you use LibreYOLO in your research or software, please cite it as below."title: "LibreYOLO"type: softwareauthors:  - family-names: Ceccon    given-names: Xuban  - name: "The LibreYOLO contributors"license: MITurl: "https://github.com/LibreYOLO/libreyolo"repository-code: "https://github.com/LibreYOLO/libreyolo"

It carries no version and no release date on purpose. RELEASING.md tells maintainers never to bump, date or retitle CITATION.cff or .zenodo.json during a release, so that every citation lands on one record instead of scattering across versions. Report the version you ran in your own text, and leave the citation alone.

Citing the model family

LibreYOLO is a port. Running LibreRFDETRm.pt means running RF-DETR, and the people who wrote RF-DETR are the ones a reviewer expects to see credited. Citing the library on its own attributes their work to the wrong project.

Everything needed sits on the family's page. The Upstream row in the header names the original work and the organization behind it, and links the paper and the source repository. The Citation section further down holds the BibTeX.

That BibTeX is copied verbatim from the authors' own citation block, normally the Citation section of the upstream README or a CITATION.cff, and it renders with a link back to the block it came from so you can check it against the source. It is never assembled from paper metadata. An entry rebuilt by hand fails quietly and expensively: a dropped coauthor, the wrong venue, the wrong entry type, a year belonging to the preprint. Preprints also get accepted, so an entry may be an @inproceedings even when the version you read was on arXiv.

Copy the block as it stands. If your bibliography style needs a different entry type, convert the entry rather than retyping it, and keep the author list in its original order.

What a methods section needs

Three things make a LibreYOLO result reproducible and correctly attributed:

• The library, cited from CITATION.cff, together with the version you ran. libreyolo version prints it, along with the Python, torch and CUDA versions it is running against.
• The upstream work, cited from the Citation section of the family's page.
• The exact checkpoint filename, such as LibreRFDETRm.pt. Sizes within a family behave differently, and several families publish checkpoints trained on different datasets under the same prefix, so the family name alone does not identify what ran.

Attribution is also a license term for much of what LibreYOLO publishes. Apache-2.0 and the CC BY family both require the notice to travel with the weights you redistribute, which is a separate obligation from citing a paper. See licensing for which terms apply to which checkpoint.