# DisCoVQA: Temporal Distortion-Content Transformers for Video Quality Assessment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.09853 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09853/

## Key facts

- Cited by 41 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [SlowFast Networks for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03982/) (2018)
- [Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05095/) (2021)
- [ViViT: A Video Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15691/) (2021)
- [Inception-v4, Inception-ResNet and the Impact of Residual Connections on Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07261/) (2016)
- [Video Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13230/) (2021)
- [MUSIQ: Multi-scale Image Quality Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05997/) (2021)
- [Multiscale Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11227/) (2021)
- [X3D: Expanding Architectures for Efficient Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04730/) (2020)
- [KonIQ-10k: An ecologically valid database for deep learning of blind image quality assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06180/) (2019)
- [From Patches to Pictures (PaQ-2-PiQ): Mapping the Perceptual Space of Picture Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.10088/) (2019)
- [Learning Spatio-Temporal Features with 3D Residual Networks for Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07632/) (2017)
- [Quality Assessment of In-the-Wild Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.00375/) (2019)
- [Patch-VQ: 'Patching Up' the Video Quality Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13544/) (2020)
- [UGC-VQA: Benchmarking Blind Video Quality Assessment for User Generated Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14354/) (2020)
- [A Deep Learning based No-reference Quality Assessment Model for UGC Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14047/) (2022)
- [Large-Scale Study of Perceptual Video Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01761/) (2018)
- [RAPIQUE: Rapid and Accurate Video Quality Prediction of User Generated Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10955/) (2021)
- [Blindly Assess Quality of In-the-Wild Videos via Quality-aware Pre-training and Motion Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08505/) (2021)
- [Unified Quality Assessment of In-the-Wild Videos with Mixed Datasets Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.04263/) (2020)
- [Perceptual Quality Prediction on Authentically Distorted Images Using a Bag of Features Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04757/) (2016)
- [Norm-in-Norm Loss with Faster Convergence and Better Performance for Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03889/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17982/) (2023)
- [Q-Align: Teaching LMMs for Visual Scoring via Discrete Text-Defined Levels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17090/) (2023)
- [Exploring Video Quality Assessment on User Generated Contents from Aesthetic and Technical Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.04894/) (2022)
- [FAST-VQA: Efficient End-to-end Video Quality Assessment with Fragment Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02595/) (2022)
- [Towards A Better Metric for Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07781/) (2024)
- [Neighbourhood Representative Sampling for Efficient End-to-end Video Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05357/) (2022)
- [Towards Explainable In-the-Wild Video Quality Assessment: A Database and a Language-Prompted Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12726/) (2023)
- [KVQ: Kwai Video Quality Assessment for Short-form Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07220/) (2024)
- [NTIRE 2024 Challenge on Short-form UGC Video Quality Assessment: Methods and Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11313/) (2024)
- [LMM-VQA: Advancing Video Quality Assessment with Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14008/) (2024)
- [Exploring the Effectiveness of Video Perceptual Representation in Blind Video Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.03723/) (2022)
- [Exploring Opinion-unaware Video Quality Assessment with Semantic Affinity Criterion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13269/) (2023)
- [Zoom-VQA: Patches, Frames and Clips Integration for Video Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06440/) (2023)
- [Ada-DQA: Adaptive Diverse Quality-aware Feature Acquisition for Video Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00729/) (2023)
- [Capturing Co-existing Distortions in User-Generated Content for No-reference Video Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16813/) (2023)
- [Towards Robust Text-Prompted Semantic Criterion for In-the-Wild Video Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14672/) (2023)
- [Video Quality Assessment: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04508/) (2024)
- [Light-VQA: A Multi-Dimensional Quality Assessment Model for Low-Light Video Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09512/) (2023)
- [Vulnerabilities in Video Quality Assessment Models: The Challenge of Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13609/) (2023)
- [CLiF-VQA: Enhancing Video Quality Assessment by Incorporating High-Level Semantic Information related to Human Feelings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07090/) (2023)
- [CLIPVQA:Video Quality Assessment via CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04928/) (2024)
- [KVQ: Boosting Video Quality Assessment via Saliency-guided Local Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10259/) (2025)
- [A Challenge to Build Neuro-Symbolic Video Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13851/) (2025)
- [Scaling-up Perceptual Video Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22543/) (2025)
- [ReLaX-VQA: Residual Fragment and Layer Stack Extraction for Enhancing Video Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11496/) (2024)
- [Video Quality Assessment for Online Processing: From Spatial to Temporal Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07087/) (2025)
- [InternVQA: Advancing Compressed Video Quality Assessment with Distilling Large Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19026/) (2025)
- [MVAD: A Multiple Visual Artifact Detector for Video Streaming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00212/) (2024)
- [Learning Disentangled Representations for Perceptual Point Cloud Quality Assessment via Mutual Information Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07936/) (2024)
- [MVQA: Mamba with Unified Sampling for Efficient Video Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16003/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The temporal relationships between frames and their influences on video quality assessment (VQA) are still under-studied in existing works. These relationships lead to two important types of effects for video quality. Firstly, some temporal variations (such as shaking, flicker, and abrupt scene transitions) are causing temporal distortions and lead to extra quality degradations, while other variations (e.g. those related to meaningful happenings) do not. Secondly, the human visual system often has different attention to frames with different contents, resulting in their different importance to the overall video quality. Based on prominent time-series modeling ability of transformers, we propose a novel and effective transformer-based VQA method to tackle these two issues. To better differentiate temporal variations and thus capture the temporal distortions, we design a transformer-based Spatial-Temporal Distortion Extraction (STDE) module. To tackle with temporal quality attention, we propose the encoder-decoder-like temporal content transformer (TCT). We also introduce the temporal sampling on features to reduce the input length for the TCT, so as to improve the learning effectiveness and efficiency of this module. Consisting of the STDE and the TCT, the proposed Temporal Distortion-Content Transformers for Video Quality Assessment (DisCoVQA) reaches state-of-the-art performance on several VQA benchmarks without any extra pre-training datasets and up to 10% better generalization ability than existing methods. We also conduct extensive ablation experiments to prove the effectiveness of each part in our proposed model, and provide visualizations to prove that the proposed modules achieve our intention on modeling these temporal issues. We will publish our codes and pretrained weights later.