# X-IQE: eXplainable Image Quality Evaluation for Text-to-Image Generation with Visual Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.10843 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10843/

## Key facts

- Cited by 28 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Image generation, text-to-image and editing, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 42 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 May 2023.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Image generation, text-to-image and editing](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/image-generation-text-to-image-and-editing/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15556/) (2022)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12712/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18223/) (2023)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [DPM-Solver: A Fast ODE Solver for Diffusion Probabilistic Model Sampling in Around 10 Steps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00927/) (2022)
- [Microsoft COCO Captions: Data Collection and Evaluation Server](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00325/) (2015)
- [Rethinking the Role of Demonstrations: What Makes In-Context Learning Work?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12837/) (2022)
- [Scaling Autoregressive Models for Content-Rich Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10789/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [GenEval: An Object-Focused Framework for Evaluating Text-to-Image Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11513/) (2023)
- [T2I-CompBench++: An Enhanced and Comprehensive Benchmark for Compositional Text-to-image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06350/) (2023)
- [AGIQA-3K: An Open Database for AI-Generated Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04717/) (2023)
- [Navigating Text-To-Image Customization: From LyCORIS Fine-Tuning to Model Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14859/) (2023)
- [Commonsense-T2I Challenge: Can Text-to-Image Generation Models Understand Commonsense?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07546/) (2024)
- [MMIE: Massive Multimodal Interleaved Comprehension Benchmark for Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10139/) (2024)
- [LMM-VQA: Advancing Video Quality Assessment with Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14008/) (2024)
- [Exploring the Naturalness of AI-Generated Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05476/) (2023)
- [Latent Watermark: Inject and Detect Watermarks in Latent Diffusion Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00230/) (2024)
- [SynArtifact: Classifying and Alleviating Artifacts in Synthetic Images via Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18068/) (2024)
- [MoLE: Enhancing Human-centric Text-to-image Diffusion via Mixture of Low-rank Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23332/) (2024)
- [FlashEval: Towards Fast and Accurate Evaluation of Text-to-image Diffusion Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16379/) (2024)
- [XEdgeAI: A Human-centered Industrial Inspection Framework with Data-centric Explainable Edge AI Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11771/) (2024)
- [ImagenWorld: Stress-Testing Image Generation Models with Explainable Human Evaluation on Open-ended Real-World Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27862/) (2026)
- [DCA-Bench: A Benchmark for Dataset Curation Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07275/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking Sequential Visual Input Reasoning and Prediction in Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13473/) (2023)
- [Reward-Agnostic Prompt Optimization for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16853/) (2025)
- [RAG-IGBench: Innovative Evaluation for RAG-based Interleaved Generation in Open-domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05119/) (2025)
- [Quality Prediction of AI Generated Images and Videos: Emerging Trends and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08534/) (2024)
- [A High-Quality Dataset and Reliable Evaluation for Interleaved Image-Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09427/) (2025)
- [Calibrating MLLM-as-a-judge via Multimodal Bayesian Prompt Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.08777/) (2025)
- [QualiRAG: Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Visual Quality Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18195/) (2026)
- [ViPO: Visual Preference Optimization at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.24953/) (2026)
- [Interactive Visual Assessment for Text-to-Image Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15509/) (2024)
- [Towards Evaluating Robustness of Prompt Adherence in Text to Image Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.08039/) (2025)
- [ReFeR: Improving Evaluation and Reasoning through Hierarchy of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12877/) (2024)
- [A New Chinese Landscape Paintings Generation Model based on Stable Diffusion using DreamBooth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08561/) (2024)
- [ABHINAW: A method for Automatic Evaluation of Typography within AI-Generated Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11874/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper introduces a novel explainable image quality evaluation approach called X-IQE, which leverages visual large language models (LLMs) to evaluate text-to-image generation methods by generating textual explanations. X-IQE utilizes a hierarchical Chain of Thought (CoT) to enable MiniGPT-4 to produce self-consistent, unbiased texts that are highly correlated with human evaluation. It offers several advantages, including the ability to distinguish between real and generated images, evaluate text-image alignment, and assess image aesthetics without requiring model training or fine-tuning. X-IQE is more cost-effective and efficient compared to human evaluation, while significantly enhancing the transparency and explainability of deep image quality evaluation models. We validate the effectiveness of our method as a benchmark using images generated by prevalent diffusion models. X-IQE demonstrates similar performance to state-of-the-art (SOTA) evaluation methods on COCO Caption, while overcoming the limitations of previous evaluation models on DrawBench, particularly in handling ambiguous generation prompts and text recognition in generated images. Project website: https://github.com/Schuture/Benchmarking-Awesome-Diffusion-Models