# Dog-IQA: Standard-guided Zero-shot MLLM for Mix-grained Image Quality Assessment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.02505 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02505/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [MUSIQ: Multi-scale Image Quality Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05997/) (2021)
- [mPLUG-Owl: Modularization Empowers Large Language Models with Multimodality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14178/) (2023)
- [Exploring CLIP for Assessing the Look and Feel of Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12396/) (2022)
- [Pick-a-Pic: An Open Dataset of User Preferences for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01569/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13549/) (2023)
- [OpenFlamingo: An Open-Source Framework for Training Large Autoregressive Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01390/) (2023)
- [mPLUG-Owl2: Revolutionizing Multi-modal Large Language Model with Modality Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04257/) (2023)
- [Q-Align: Teaching LMMs for Visual Scoring via Discrete Text-Defined Levels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17090/) (2023)
- [NIMA: Neural Image Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.05424/) (2017)
- [KonIQ-10k: An ecologically valid database for deep learning of blind image quality assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06180/) (2019)
- [InternLM-XComposer2: Mastering Free-form Text-Image Composition and Comprehension in Vision-Language Large Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16420/) (2024)
- [Blind Image Quality Assessment Using A Deep Bilinear Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02665/) (2019)
- [InternLM-XComposer: A Vision-Language Large Model for Advanced Text-image Comprehension and Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15112/) (2023)
- [mPLUG-Owl3: Towards Long Image-Sequence Understanding in Multi-Modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04840/) (2024)
- [Q-Bench: A Benchmark for General-Purpose Foundation Models on Low-level Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14181/) (2023)
- [From Patches to Pictures (PaQ-2-PiQ): Mapping the Perceptual Space of Picture Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.10088/) (2019)
- [Massive Online Crowdsourced Study of Subjective and Objective Picture Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02919/) (2015)
- [Q-Instruct: Improving Low-level Visual Abilities for Multi-modality Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06783/) (2023)
- [AGIQA-3K: An Open Database for AI-Generated Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04717/) (2023)
- [GroundingGPT:Language Enhanced Multi-modal Grounding Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06071/) (2024)
- [Equivariant Multi-Modality Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11443/) (2023)
- [Re-IQA: Unsupervised Learning for Image Quality Assessment in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00451/) (2023)
- [Weakly-Supervised Concealed Object Segmentation with SAM-based Pseudo Labeling and Multi-scale Feature Grouping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11003/) (2023)
- [Towards Open-ended Visual Quality Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16641/) (2024)
- [Data-Efficient Image Quality Assessment with Attention-Panel Decoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04952/) (2023)

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

- [Teaching Large Language Models to Regress Accurate Image Quality Scores using Score Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.11561/) (2025)
- [InfVSR: Toward Consistency-Driven Streaming Generative Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.00948/) (2025)
- [Zoom-IQA: Image Quality Assessment with Reliable Region-Aware Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02918/) (2026)
- [AgenticIQA: An Agentic Framework for Adaptive and Interpretable Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.26006/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Diffusion-based Restoration Models via Difficulty-Adaptive Reinforcement Learning with IQA Reward](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01645/) (2025)
- [From Global to Granular: Revealing IQA Model Performance via Correlation Surface](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21738/) (2026)
- [Unpaired Image Deraining Using Reward-Guided Self-Reinforcement Strategy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.00719/) (2026)
- [IQA-T1: Tool-based Visual Evidence Reasoning for Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.12375/) (2026)
- [Discrete Annotation, Continuous Preference: Rethinking Supervision for Accurate and Generalizable Aesthetic Image Cropping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.00582/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Image quality assessment (IQA) serves as the golden standard for all models' performance in nearly all computer vision fields. However, it still suffers from poor out-of-distribution generalization ability and expensive training costs. To address these problems, we propose Dog-IQA, a standard-guided zero-shot mix-grained IQA method, which is training-free and utilizes the exceptional prior knowledge of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). To obtain accurate IQA scores, namely scores consistent with humans, we design an MLLM-based inference pipeline that imitates human experts. In detail, Dog-IQA applies two techniques. First, Dog-IQA objectively scores with specific standards that utilize MLLM's behavior pattern and minimize the influence of subjective factors. Second, Dog-IQA comprehensively takes local semantic objects and the whole image as input and aggregates their scores, leveraging local and global information. Our proposed Dog-IQA achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance compared with training-free methods, and competitive performance compared with training-based methods in cross-dataset scenarios. Our code will be available at https://github.com/Kai-Liu001/Dog-IQA.