Q-Insight: Understanding Image Quality via Visual Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Li, Weiqi, Zhang, Xuanyu, Zhao, Shijie, Zhang, Yabin, Li, Junlin, Zhang, Li, Zhang, Jian
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Li, Weiqi
Zhang, Xuanyu
Zhao, Shijie
Zhang, Yabin
Li, Junlin
Zhang, Li
Zhang, Jian
author_facet Li, Weiqi
Zhang, Xuanyu
Zhao, Shijie
Zhang, Yabin
Li, Junlin
Zhang, Li
Zhang, Jian
contents Image quality assessment (IQA) focuses on the perceptual visual quality of images, playing a crucial role in downstream tasks such as image reconstruction, compression, and generation. The rapid advancement of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) has significantly broadened the scope of IQA, moving toward comprehensive image quality understanding that incorporates content analysis, degradation perception, and comparison reasoning beyond mere numerical scoring. Previous MLLM-based methods typically either generate numerical scores lacking interpretability or heavily rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) using large-scale annotated datasets to provide descriptive assessments, limiting their flexibility and applicability. In this paper, we propose Q-Insight, a reinforcement learning-based model built upon group relative policy optimization (GRPO), which demonstrates strong visual reasoning capability for image quality understanding while requiring only a limited amount of rating scores and degradation labels. By jointly optimizing score regression and degradation perception tasks with carefully designed reward functions, our approach effectively exploits their mutual benefits for enhanced performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Q-Insight substantially outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in both score regression and degradation perception tasks, while exhibiting impressive zero-shot generalization to comparison reasoning tasks. Code will be available at https://github.com/lwq20020127/Q-Insight.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_22679
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Q-Insight: Understanding Image Quality via Visual Reinforcement Learning
Li, Weiqi
Zhang, Xuanyu
Zhao, Shijie
Zhang, Yabin
Li, Junlin
Zhang, Li
Zhang, Jian
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Image quality assessment (IQA) focuses on the perceptual visual quality of images, playing a crucial role in downstream tasks such as image reconstruction, compression, and generation. The rapid advancement of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) has significantly broadened the scope of IQA, moving toward comprehensive image quality understanding that incorporates content analysis, degradation perception, and comparison reasoning beyond mere numerical scoring. Previous MLLM-based methods typically either generate numerical scores lacking interpretability or heavily rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) using large-scale annotated datasets to provide descriptive assessments, limiting their flexibility and applicability. In this paper, we propose Q-Insight, a reinforcement learning-based model built upon group relative policy optimization (GRPO), which demonstrates strong visual reasoning capability for image quality understanding while requiring only a limited amount of rating scores and degradation labels. By jointly optimizing score regression and degradation perception tasks with carefully designed reward functions, our approach effectively exploits their mutual benefits for enhanced performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Q-Insight substantially outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in both score regression and degradation perception tasks, while exhibiting impressive zero-shot generalization to comparison reasoning tasks. Code will be available at https://github.com/lwq20020127/Q-Insight.
title Q-Insight: Understanding Image Quality via Visual Reinforcement Learning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.22679