arXiv AI

Task-Utility IQA: Rethinking Image Quality Assessment in Embodied Tasks

The paper proposes rethinking image quality assessment (IQA) for embodied tasks by moving from generic score regression to goal‑conditioned judgments based on task utility. It introduces an MLLM‑based IQA agent that reasons about task requirements, grounds quality evidence, and outputs decision‑facing assessments. Experiments on VisDrone show that conventional perceptual metrics and generic IQA scores poorly predict downstream VLM task success, whereas a task‑conditioned utility score better indicates whether visual input supports the target task.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Oct 27

VGIQA: Fine-Grained Image Quality Assessment with Visual Grounding Rewards

VGIQA is a new image quality assessment model that provides both local and global quality evaluations. It uses a two‑stage training process—starting with a cold‑start phase and then reinforcement learning guided by local quality reward functions. The model demonstrates superior performance on the newly introduced VGSR‑2K dataset, outperforming existing open‑source multi‑modal large language models such as Qwen2.5‑VL‑72B‑Instruct and Qwen3‑VL‑32B‑Instruct, and it also improves degradation perception tasks.

arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

PreResQ-R1: Response-Preference Disentangled Ranking-and-Scoring Reinforcement Optimization for Robust Visual Quality Assessment

PreResQ‑R1 introduces a Preference‑Response Disentangled Reinforcement Learning framework for Visual Quality Assessment that jointly optimizes absolute score regression and relative ranking consistency. It employs a dual‑branch reward system—modeling intra‑sample response coherence and inter‑sample preference alignment—trained with Group Relative Policy Optimization. The method extends to video quality assessment via a global‑temporal and local‑spatial data flow strategy, achieving state‑of‑the‑art results on 10 IQA and 5 VQA benchmarks with only 6K images and 28K videos, and provides human‑aligned reasoning traces.

By Zehui Feng, Weichuan Wang, Xiaohan Chen, Ting Han
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 28

VGIQA: Fine-Grained Image Quality Assessment with Visual Grounding Rewards

VGIQA is a new image quality assessment model that provides both local and global quality evaluations. It uses a two-stage training process—initial cold-start followed by reinforcement learning—with local quality reward functions. The model outperforms existing large multimodal language models on the newly introduced VGSR-2K dataset and improves performance on degradation perception tasks.

By Weichang Wang, Liyu Chen, Shuyue Guan, Jie Hu, Fei Gao, Wei Li, Nannan Wang
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 23

LLaVA-Assessor: Building the Foundation LMM For Visual Quality Assessment

LLaVA‑Assessor is a unified large multi‑modal model (LMM) designed for visual quality assessment, combining image and video inputs. It introduces a two‑task framework—quality interpretation and quality scoring—supported by an adaptive architecture, a rigorous human‑annotated dataset, and a machine‑synthesized data expansion pipeline. The model employs a prompt‑disentanglement strategy to stabilize multi‑task training and achieves strong performance across 11 quality scoring test sets and 4 interpretation benchmarks.

By Ziheng Jia, Zicheng Zhang, Jiaying Qian, Guangtao Zhai, Xiongkuo Min
arXiv AI
Aug 20

MR-IQA-2: Faithful Image Quality Reflection via Fine-Grained Credit Assignment

MR‑IQA‑2 introduces an actor‑editor‑judge framework that separates reasoning from rating in image quality assessment. The actor generates quality reasoning, the editor modifies the image based on identified factors, and a frozen judge compares the original and edited images to provide reflective supervision. Fine‑grained credit assignment allows distinct supervision signals for reasoning and rating, achieving competitive human‑aligned ratings while offering richer, faithful visual understanding.

By Yuan li, Youyuan Lin, Chenhui Chu, Shin'ya Nishida