Title: LLM-IQA: Standard-guided MLLM for Mix-grained Image Quality Assessment
Primary area: applications to computer vision, audio, language, and other modalities
Keywords: image quality assessment, multimodal LLM

Abstract: Image quality assessment (IQA) serves as the golden standard for all models' performance in nearly all computer vision fields. However, it still suffers from poor out-of-distribution generalization ability and expensive training costs. To address these problems, we propose LLM-IQA, a standard-guided zero-shot mix-grained IQA method, which is training-free and utilizes the exceptional prior knowledge of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). To obtain accurate IQA scores, namely scores consistent with humans, we design an MLLM-based inference pipeline that imitates human experts. In detail, LLM-IQA applies two techniques. First, LLM-IQA objectively scores with specific standards that utilize MLLM's behavior pattern and minimize the influence of subjective factors. Second, LLM-IQA comprehensively takes local semantic objects and the whole image as input and aggregates their scores, leveraging local and global information. Our proposed LLM-IQA achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance compared with training-free methods, and competitive performance compared with training-based methods in cross-dataset scenarios. Our code will be released soon.

TL;DR: A MLLM based IQA method.