Zoom-IQA: Image Quality Assessment with Reliable Region-Aware Reasoning

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Liang, Guoqiang, Wang, Jianyi, Wu, Zhonghua, Zhou, Shangchen
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866915732072169472
author Liang, Guoqiang
Wang, Jianyi
Wu, Zhonghua
Zhou, Shangchen
author_facet Liang, Guoqiang
Wang, Jianyi
Wu, Zhonghua
Zhou, Shangchen
contents Image Quality Assessment (IQA) is a long-standing problem in computer vision. Previous methods typically focus on predicting numerical scores without explanation or providing low-level descriptions lacking precise scores. Recent reasoning-based vision language models (VLMs) have shown strong potential for IQA by jointly generating quality descriptions and scores. However, existing VLM-based IQA methods often suffer from unreliable reasoning due to their limited capability of integrating visual and textual cues. In this work, we introduce Zoom-IQA, a VLM-based IQA model to explicitly emulate key cognitive behaviors: uncertainty awareness, region reasoning, and iterative refinement. Specifically, we present a two-stage training pipeline: 1) supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on our Grounded-Rationale-IQA (GR-IQA) dataset to teach the model to ground its assessments in key regions, and 2) reinforcement learning (RL) for dynamic policy exploration, stabilized by our KL-Coverage regularizer to prevent reasoning and scoring diversity collapse, with a Progressive Re-sampling Strategy for mitigating annotation bias. Extensive experiments show that Zoom-IQA achieves improved robustness, explainability, and generalization. The application to downstream tasks, such as image restoration, further demonstrates the effectiveness of Zoom-IQA.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_02918
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Zoom-IQA: Image Quality Assessment with Reliable Region-Aware Reasoning
Liang, Guoqiang
Wang, Jianyi
Wu, Zhonghua
Zhou, Shangchen
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Image Quality Assessment (IQA) is a long-standing problem in computer vision. Previous methods typically focus on predicting numerical scores without explanation or providing low-level descriptions lacking precise scores. Recent reasoning-based vision language models (VLMs) have shown strong potential for IQA by jointly generating quality descriptions and scores. However, existing VLM-based IQA methods often suffer from unreliable reasoning due to their limited capability of integrating visual and textual cues. In this work, we introduce Zoom-IQA, a VLM-based IQA model to explicitly emulate key cognitive behaviors: uncertainty awareness, region reasoning, and iterative refinement. Specifically, we present a two-stage training pipeline: 1) supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on our Grounded-Rationale-IQA (GR-IQA) dataset to teach the model to ground its assessments in key regions, and 2) reinforcement learning (RL) for dynamic policy exploration, stabilized by our KL-Coverage regularizer to prevent reasoning and scoring diversity collapse, with a Progressive Re-sampling Strategy for mitigating annotation bias. Extensive experiments show that Zoom-IQA achieves improved robustness, explainability, and generalization. The application to downstream tasks, such as image restoration, further demonstrates the effectiveness of Zoom-IQA.
title Zoom-IQA: Image Quality Assessment with Reliable Region-Aware Reasoning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02918