# Assessing Image Quality Using a Simple Generative Representation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.18178 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18178/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Generating Diverse High-Fidelity Images with VQ-VAE-2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00446/) (2019)
- [Image Quality Assessment: Unifying Structure and Texture Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07728/) (2020)
- [Efficient Object Localization Using Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4280/) (2014)
- [Deep Neural Networks for No-Reference and Full-Reference Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01697/) (2016)
- [Gradient Magnitude Similarity Deviation: A Highly Efficient Perceptual Image Quality Index](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.3052/) (2013)
- [PieAPP: Perceptual Image-Error Assessment through Pairwise Preference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02067/) (2018)
- [Attentions Help CNNs See Better: Attention-based Hybrid Image Quality Assessment Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10485/) (2022)
- [Perceptual Image Quality Assessment with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14730/) (2021)
- [Multi-Stage Variational Auto-Encoders for Coarse-to-Fine Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07202/) (2017)
- [Subjective and Objective Quality Assessment of Image: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.7799/) (2014)
- [High Fidelity Image Synthesis With Deep VAEs In Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13714/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Do Generative Priors Align with Human Naturalness Perception?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.09928/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Perceptual image quality assessment (IQA) is the task of predicting the visual quality of an image as perceived by a human observer. Current state-of-the-art techniques are based on deep representations trained in discriminative manner. Such representations may ignore visually important features, if they are not predictive of class labels. Recent generative models successfully learn low-dimensional representations using auto-encoding and have been argued to preserve better visual features. Here we leverage existing auto-encoders and propose VAE-QA, a simple and efficient method for predicting image quality in the presence of a full-reference. We evaluate our approach on four standard benchmarks and find that it significantly improves generalization across datasets, has fewer trainable parameters, a smaller memory footprint and faster run time.