# QMamba: On First Exploration of Vision Mamba for Image Quality Assessment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.09546 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09546/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Vision Mamba backbones, one of 10 directions in State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba).
- Builds on 23 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jun 2024.

## Placed in

- State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba) / [Vision Mamba backbones](https://mlsanity.com/ssm/vision-mamba-backbones/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Efficiently Modeling Long Sequences with Structured State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00396/) (2021)
- [Vision Mamba: Efficient Visual Representation Learning with Bidirectional State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09417/) (2024)
- [VMamba: Visual State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10166/) (2024)
- [Simplified State Space Layers for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04933/) (2022)
- [Hungry Hungry Hippos: Towards Language Modeling with State Space Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.14052/) (2022)
- [U-Mamba: Enhancing Long-range Dependency for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04722/) (2024)
- [MambaIR: A Simple Baseline for Image Restoration with State-Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15648/) (2024)
- [VideoMamba: State Space Model for Efficient Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06977/) (2024)
- [SegMamba: Long-range Sequential Modeling Mamba For 3D Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13560/) (2024)
- [LocalMamba: Visual State Space Model with Windowed Selective Scan](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09338/) (2024)
- [Swin-UMamba: Mamba-based UNet with ImageNet-based pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03302/) (2024)
- [PointMamba: A Simple State Space Model for Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10739/) (2024)
- [Video Mamba Suite: State Space Model as a Versatile Alternative for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09626/) (2024)
- [VmambaIR: Visual State Space Model for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11423/) (2024)
- [SiMBA: Simplified Mamba-Based Architecture for Vision and Multivariate Time series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15360/) (2024)
- [Point Mamba: A Novel Point Cloud Backbone Based on State Space Model with Octree-Based Ordering Strategy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06467/) (2024)
- [Point Cloud Mamba: Point Cloud Learning via State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00762/) (2024)
- [FreqMamba: Viewing Mamba from a Frequency Perspective for Image Deraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09476/) (2024)
- [A Probabilistic Quality Representation Approach to Deep Blind Image Quality Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.08190/) (2017)
- [StyleAM: Perception-Oriented Unsupervised Domain Adaption for Non-reference Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14489/) (2022)
- [Video Quality Assessment Based on Swin TransformerV2 and Coarse to Fine Strategy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08522/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [MambaIC: State Space Models for High-Performance Learned Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12461/) (2025)
- [MambaCSR: Dual-Interleaved Scanning for Compressed Image Super-Resolution With SSMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11758/) (2024)
- [NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Short-form UGC Video Restoration in the Wild with Generative Models: Datasets, Methods and Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10551/) (2026)
- [MPQ-DMv2: Flexible Residual Mixed Precision Quantization for Low-Bit Diffusion Models with Temporal Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04290/) (2025)
- [InternVQA: Advancing Compressed Video Quality Assessment with Distilling Large Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19026/) (2025)
- [VCMamba: Bridging Convolutions with Multi-Directional Mamba for Efficient Visual Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.04669/) (2025)
- [Unleashing Vision Transformer Potential In Image Quality Assessment via Global-Local Adaptive Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17748/) (2026)
- [Contrastive Order Learning: A General Framework for Ordinal Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.08109/) (2026)
- [Bridging the Perceptual Gap: Residual-Enhanced Downscaling and Manifold-Aware Perception Alignment Adaptation for NR-IQA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.16664/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this work, we take the first exploration of the recently popular foundation model, i.e., State Space Model/Mamba, in image quality assessment (IQA), aiming at observing and excavating the perception potential in vision Mamba. A series of works on Mamba has shown its significant potential in various fields, e.g., segmentation and classification. However, the perception capability of Mamba remains under-explored. Consequently, we propose QMamba by revisiting and adapting the Mamba model for three crucial IQA tasks, i.e., task-specific, universal, and transferable IQA, which reveals its clear advantages over existing foundational models, e.g., Swin Transformer, ViT, and CNNs, in terms of perception and computational cost. To improve the transferability of QMamba, we propose the StylePrompt tuning paradigm, where lightweight mean and variance prompts are injected to assist task-adaptive transfer learning of pre-trained QMamba for different downstream IQA tasks. Compared with existing prompt tuning strategies, our StylePrompt enables better perceptual transfer with lower computational cost. Extensive experiments on multiple synthetic, authentic IQA datasets, and cross IQA datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed QMamba. The code will be available at: https://github.com/bingo-G/QMamba.git