This workshop introduces practitioners to modern toolkits, foundation model distillation via Autodistill, direct open-vocabulary detection with YOLOE-26, and edge-optimized deployment using YOLO26 (released January 14, 2026). Participants will learn to choose the right approach for their use case: auto-label datasets using SAM 3 and Grounding DINO, train lightweight YOLO26 models for edge deployment, or leverage YOLOE-26’s text and visual prompts to detect arbitrary objects without any training at all.










