VisualQuality-R1: Reasoning-Induced Image Quality Assessment via Reinforcement Learning to Rank

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Wu, Tianhe, Zou, Jian, Liang, Jie, Zhang, Lei, Ma, Kede
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866914104680120320
author Wu, Tianhe
Zou, Jian
Liang, Jie
Zhang, Lei
Ma, Kede
author_facet Wu, Tianhe
Zou, Jian
Liang, Jie
Zhang, Lei
Ma, Kede
contents DeepSeek-R1 has demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in incentivizing reasoning and generalization capabilities of large language models (LLMs) through reinforcement learning. Nevertheless, the potential of reasoning-induced computation has not been thoroughly explored in the context of image quality assessment (IQA), a task depending critically on visual reasoning. In this paper, we introduce VisualQuality-R1, a reasoning-induced no-reference IQA (NR-IQA) model, and we train it with reinforcement learning to rank, a learning algorithm tailored to the intrinsically relative nature of visual quality. Specifically, for a pair of images, we employ group relative policy optimization to generate multiple quality scores for each image. These estimates are used to compute comparative probabilities of one image having higher quality than the other under the Thurstone model. Rewards for each quality estimate are defined using continuous fidelity measures rather than discretized binary labels. Extensive experiments show that the proposed VisualQuality-R1 consistently outperforms discriminative deep learning-based NR-IQA models as well as a recent reasoning-induced quality regression method. Moreover, VisualQuality-R1 is capable of generating contextually rich, human-aligned quality descriptions, and supports multi-dataset training without requiring perceptual scale realignment. These features make VisualQuality-R1 especially well-suited for reliably measuring progress in a wide range of image processing tasks like super-resolution and image generation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_14460
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle VisualQuality-R1: Reasoning-Induced Image Quality Assessment via Reinforcement Learning to Rank
Wu, Tianhe
Zou, Jian
Liang, Jie
Zhang, Lei
Ma, Kede
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
DeepSeek-R1 has demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in incentivizing reasoning and generalization capabilities of large language models (LLMs) through reinforcement learning. Nevertheless, the potential of reasoning-induced computation has not been thoroughly explored in the context of image quality assessment (IQA), a task depending critically on visual reasoning. In this paper, we introduce VisualQuality-R1, a reasoning-induced no-reference IQA (NR-IQA) model, and we train it with reinforcement learning to rank, a learning algorithm tailored to the intrinsically relative nature of visual quality. Specifically, for a pair of images, we employ group relative policy optimization to generate multiple quality scores for each image. These estimates are used to compute comparative probabilities of one image having higher quality than the other under the Thurstone model. Rewards for each quality estimate are defined using continuous fidelity measures rather than discretized binary labels. Extensive experiments show that the proposed VisualQuality-R1 consistently outperforms discriminative deep learning-based NR-IQA models as well as a recent reasoning-induced quality regression method. Moreover, VisualQuality-R1 is capable of generating contextually rich, human-aligned quality descriptions, and supports multi-dataset training without requiring perceptual scale realignment. These features make VisualQuality-R1 especially well-suited for reliably measuring progress in a wide range of image processing tasks like super-resolution and image generation.
title VisualQuality-R1: Reasoning-Induced Image Quality Assessment via Reinforcement Learning to Rank
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.14460