# Towards Robust Text-Prompted Semantic Criterion for In-the-Wild Video Quality Assessment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.14672 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14672/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 68 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [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)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [Conditional Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05557/) (2022)
- [CoCa: Contrastive Captioners are Image-Text Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01917/) (2022)
- [Exploring CLIP for Assessing the Look and Feel of Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12396/) (2022)
- [SimVLM: Simple Visual Language Model Pretraining with Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10904/) (2021)
- [ImageNet-21K Pretraining for the Masses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10972/) (2021)
- [DenseCLIP: Language-Guided Dense Prediction with Context-Aware Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01518/) (2021)
- [NIMA: Neural Image Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.05424/) (2017)
- [Expanding Language-Image Pretrained Models for General Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.02816/) (2022)
- [Blind Image Quality Assessment Using A Deep Bilinear Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02665/) (2019)
- [Blind Image Quality Assessment via Vision-Language Correspondence: A Multitask Learning Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14968/) (2023)
- [From Patches to Pictures (PaQ-2-PiQ): Mapping the Perceptual Space of Picture Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.10088/) (2019)
- [FAST-VQA: Efficient End-to-end Video Quality Assessment with Fragment Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02595/) (2022)
- [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)
- [YouTube UGC Dataset for Video Compression Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06457/) (2019)
- [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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [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)
- [Q-Instruct: Improving Low-level Visual Abilities for Multi-modality Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06783/) (2023)
- [Towards A Better Metric for Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07781/) (2024)
- [Towards Explainable In-the-Wild Video Quality Assessment: A Database and a Language-Prompted Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12726/) (2023)
- [VBench++: Comprehensive and Versatile Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13503/) (2024)
- [Analysis of Video Quality Datasets via Design of Minimalistic Video Quality Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13981/) (2023)
- [Quality-Aware Image-Text Alignment for Opinion-Unaware Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11176/) (2024)
- [Advancing Zero-Shot Digital Human Quality Assessment through Text-Prompted Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02808/) (2023)
- [Light-VQA: A Multi-Dimensional Quality Assessment Model for Low-Light Video Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09512/) (2023)
- [CLiF-VQA: Enhancing Video Quality Assessment by Incorporating High-Level Semantic Information related to Human Feelings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07090/) (2023)
- [CLIP-PCQA: Exploring Subjective-Aligned Vision-Language Modeling for Point Cloud Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.10071/) (2025)
- [MVQA: Mamba with Unified Sampling for Efficient Video Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16003/) (2025)
- [DVLTA-VQA: Decoupled Vision-Language Modeling with Text-Guided Adaptation for Blind Video Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11733/) (2025)
- [Are Video Generation Models Geographically Fair? An Attraction-Centric Evaluation of Global Visual Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18698/) (2026)
- [Dyna3: VLM-Guided Training-Free 4D Reconstruction via Depth Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.01286/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The proliferation of videos collected during in-the-wild natural settings has pushed the development of effective Video Quality Assessment (VQA) methodologies. Contemporary supervised opinion-driven VQA strategies predominantly hinge on training from expensive human annotations for quality scores, which limited the scale and distribution of VQA datasets and consequently led to unsatisfactory generalization capacity of methods driven by these data. On the other hand, although several handcrafted zero-shot quality indices do not require training from human opinions, they are unable to account for the semantics of videos, rendering them ineffective in comprehending complex authentic distortions (e.g., white balance, exposure) and assessing the quality of semantic content within videos. To address these challenges, we introduce the text-prompted Semantic Affinity Quality Index (SAQI) and its localized version (SAQI-Local) using Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) to ascertain the affinity between textual prompts and visual features, facilitating a comprehensive examination of semantic quality concerns without the reliance on human quality annotations. By amalgamating SAQI with existing low-level metrics, we propose the unified Blind Video Quality Index (BVQI) and its improved version, BVQI-Local, which demonstrates unprecedented performance, surpassing existing zero-shot indices by at least 24% on all datasets. Moreover, we devise an efficient fine-tuning scheme for BVQI-Local that jointly optimizes text prompts and final fusion weights, resulting in state-of-the-art performance and superior generalization ability in comparison to prevalent opinion-driven VQA methods. We conduct comprehensive analyses to investigate different quality concerns of distinct indices, demonstrating the effectiveness and rationality of our design.