Generalizable Video Quality Assessment via Weak-to-Strong Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Cao, Linhan, Sun, Wei, Zhu, Xiangyang, Zhang, Kaiwei, Jia, Jun, Peng, Yicong, Zhu, Dandan, Zhai, Guangtao, Min, Xiongkuo
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Cao, Linhan
Sun, Wei
Zhu, Xiangyang
Zhang, Kaiwei
Jia, Jun
Peng, Yicong
Zhu, Dandan
Zhai, Guangtao
Min, Xiongkuo
author_facet Cao, Linhan
Sun, Wei
Zhu, Xiangyang
Zhang, Kaiwei
Jia, Jun
Peng, Yicong
Zhu, Dandan
Zhai, Guangtao
Min, Xiongkuo
contents Video quality assessment (VQA) seeks to predict the perceptual quality of a video in alignment with human visual perception, serving as a fundamental tool for quantifying quality degradation across video processing workflows. The dominant VQA paradigm relies on supervised training with human-labeled datasets, which, despite substantial progress, still suffers from poor generalization to unseen video content. In this work, we explore weak-to-strong (W2S) learning as a new paradigm for advancing VQA without reliance on human-labeled datasets. We first provide empirical evidence that a straightforward W2S strategy allows a strong student model to not only match its weak teacher on in-domain benchmarks but also surpass it on out-of-distribution (OOD) benchmarks, revealing a distinct weak-to-strong effect in VQA. Building on this insight, we propose a novel framework that enhances W2S learning from two aspects: (1) integrating homogeneous and heterogeneous supervision signals from diverse VQA teachers -- including off-the-shelf VQA models and synthetic distortion simulators -- via a learn-to-rank formulation, and (2) iterative W2S training, where each strong student is recycled as the teacher in subsequent cycles, progressively focusing on challenging cases. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art results across both in-domain and OOD benchmarks, with especially strong gains in OOD scenarios. Our findings highlight W2S learning as a principled route to break annotation barriers and achieve scalable generalization in video quality assessment. Our data and code will be available at https://github.com/clh124/W2S-VQA.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_03631
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Generalizable Video Quality Assessment via Weak-to-Strong Learning
Cao, Linhan
Sun, Wei
Zhu, Xiangyang
Zhang, Kaiwei
Jia, Jun
Peng, Yicong
Zhu, Dandan
Zhai, Guangtao
Min, Xiongkuo
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Video quality assessment (VQA) seeks to predict the perceptual quality of a video in alignment with human visual perception, serving as a fundamental tool for quantifying quality degradation across video processing workflows. The dominant VQA paradigm relies on supervised training with human-labeled datasets, which, despite substantial progress, still suffers from poor generalization to unseen video content. In this work, we explore weak-to-strong (W2S) learning as a new paradigm for advancing VQA without reliance on human-labeled datasets. We first provide empirical evidence that a straightforward W2S strategy allows a strong student model to not only match its weak teacher on in-domain benchmarks but also surpass it on out-of-distribution (OOD) benchmarks, revealing a distinct weak-to-strong effect in VQA. Building on this insight, we propose a novel framework that enhances W2S learning from two aspects: (1) integrating homogeneous and heterogeneous supervision signals from diverse VQA teachers -- including off-the-shelf VQA models and synthetic distortion simulators -- via a learn-to-rank formulation, and (2) iterative W2S training, where each strong student is recycled as the teacher in subsequent cycles, progressively focusing on challenging cases. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art results across both in-domain and OOD benchmarks, with especially strong gains in OOD scenarios. Our findings highlight W2S learning as a principled route to break annotation barriers and achieve scalable generalization in video quality assessment. Our data and code will be available at https://github.com/clh124/W2S-VQA.
title Generalizable Video Quality Assessment via Weak-to-Strong Learning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.03631