# Teaching Large Language Models to Regress Accurate Image Quality Scores using Score Distribution

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.11561 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.11561/

## Key facts

- Cited by 141 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Image editing and quality assessment, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 68 of its 95 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jan 2025.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Image editing and quality assessment](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/image-editing-and-quality-assessment/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 68)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06281/) (2023)
- [SentencePiece: A simple and language independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer for Neural Text Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06226/) (2018)
- [Learn to Explain: Multimodal Reasoning via Thought Chains for Science Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09513/) (2022)
- [Towards VQA Models That Can Read](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08920/) (2019)
- [ChartQA: A Benchmark for Question Answering about Charts with Visual and Logical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10244/) (2022)
- [Microsoft COCO Captions: Data Collection and Evaluation Server](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00325/) (2015)
- [DocVQA: A Dataset for VQA on Document Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00398/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Image Quality Assessment: Unifying Structure and Texture Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07728/) (2020)
- [mPLUG-Owl2: Revolutionizing Multi-modal Large Language Model with Modality Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04257/) (2023)
- [MANIQA: Multi-dimension Attention Network for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08958/) (2022)
- [Q-Align: Teaching LMMs for Visual Scoring via Discrete Text-Defined Levels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17090/) (2023)
- [nocaps: novel object captioning at scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08658/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Blind Image Quality Assessment Using A Deep Bilinear Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02665/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 141)

- [Flow-GRPO: Training Flow Matching Models via Online RL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05470/) (2025)
- [Emu3.5: Native Multimodal Models are World Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.26583/) (2025)
- [Q-Insight: Understanding Image Quality via Visual Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22679/) (2025)
- [VisualQuality-R1: Reasoning-Induced Image Quality Assessment via Reinforcement Learning to Rank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14460/) (2025)
- [ArtiMuse: Fine-Grained Image Aesthetics Assessment with Joint Scoring and Expert-Level Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14533/) (2025)
- [VideoScore2: Think before You Score in Generative Video Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22799/) (2025)
- [Toward Generalized Image Quality Assessment: Relaxing the Perfect Reference Quality Assumption](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11221/) (2025)
- [Flow-OPD: On-Policy Distillation for Flow Matching Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08063/) (2026)
- [Directly Aligning the Full Diffusion Trajectory with Fine-Grained Human Preference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06942/) (2025)
- [LoRA-Edit: Controllable First-Frame-Guided Video Editing via Mask-Aware LoRA Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10082/) (2025)
- [VQ-Insight: Teaching VLMs for AI-Generated Video Quality Understanding via Progressive Visual Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18564/) (2025)
- [AR-GRPO: Training Autoregressive Image Generation Models via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06924/) (2025)
- [UniPercept: Towards Unified Perceptual-Level Image Understanding across Aesthetics, Quality, Structure, and Texture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21675/) (2025)
- [DenseGRPO: From Sparse to Dense Reward for Flow Matching Model Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20218/) (2026)
- [Reinforce Adjoint Matching: Scaling RL Post-Training of Diffusion and Flow-Matching Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10759/) (2026)
- [Group Critical-token Policy Optimization for Autoregressive Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22485/) (2025)
- [CulturalFrames: Assessing Cultural Expectation Alignment in Text-to-Image Models and Evaluation Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08835/) (2025)
- [NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Short-form UGC Video Quality Assessment and Enhancement: Methods and Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13131/) (2025)
- [Q-Ponder: A Unified Training Pipeline for Reasoning-based Visual Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05384/) (2025)
- [Reinforcing Diffusion Models by Direct Group Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08425/) (2025)
- [LLaDA2.0-Uni: Unifying Multimodal Understanding and Generation with Diffusion Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.20796/) (2026)
- [Consolidating Reinforcement Learning for Multimodal Discrete Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02880/) (2025)
- [ClearAIR: A Human-Visual-Perception-Inspired All-in-One Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02763/) (2026)
- [NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Short-form UGC Video Quality Assessment and Enhancement: KwaiSR Dataset and Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15003/) (2025)
- [Transition Matching: Scalable and Flexible Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23589/) (2025)
- [Self-Evolving Vision-Language Models for Image Quality Assessment via Voting and Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25787/) (2025)
- [Generative World Renderer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02329/) (2026)
- [PhotoFramer: Multi-modal Image Composition Instruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00993/) (2025)
- [Understanding Reward Hacking in Text-to-Image Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03468/) (2026)
- [Alleviating Sparse Rewards by Modeling Step-Wise and Long-Term Sampling Effects in Flow-Based GRPO](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06422/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the rapid advancement of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), MLLM-based Image Quality Assessment (IQA) methods have shown promising performance in linguistic quality description. However, current methods still fall short in accurately scoring image quality. In this work, we aim to leverage MLLMs to regress accurate quality scores. A key challenge is that the quality score is inherently continuous, typically modeled as a Gaussian distribution, whereas MLLMs generate discrete token outputs. This mismatch necessitates score discretization. Previous approaches discretize the mean score into a one-hot label, resulting in information loss and failing to capture inter-image relationships. We propose a distribution-based approach that discretizes the score distribution into a soft label. This method preserves the characteristics of the score distribution, achieving high accuracy and maintaining inter-image relationships. Moreover, to address dataset variation, where different IQA datasets exhibit various distributions, we introduce a fidelity loss based on Thurstone's model. This loss captures intra-dataset relationships, facilitating co-training across multiple IQA datasets. With these designs, we develop the distribution-based Depicted image Quality Assessment model for Score regression (DeQA-Score). Experiments across multiple benchmarks show that DeQA-Score stably outperforms baselines in score regression. Also, DeQA-Score can predict the score distribution that closely aligns with human annotations. Codes and model weights have been released in https://depictqa.github.io/deqa-score/.