# Next Token Is Enough: Realistic Image Quality and Aesthetic Scoring with Multimodal Large Language Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.06141 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06141/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 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 42 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Mar 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 42)

- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [Expanding Performance Boundaries of Open-Source Multimodal Models with Model, Data, and Test-Time Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05271/) (2024)
- [MUSIQ: Multi-scale Image Quality Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05997/) (2021)
- [MiniCPM-V: A GPT-4V Level MLLM on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01800/) (2024)
- [ShareGPT4V: Improving Large Multi-Modal Models with Better Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12793/) (2023)
- [Exploring CLIP for Assessing the Look and Feel of Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12396/) (2022)
- [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)
- [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 via Vision-Language Correspondence: A Multitask Learning Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14968/) (2023)
- [Q-Bench: A Benchmark for General-Purpose Foundation Models on Low-level Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14181/) (2023)
- [Professor Forcing: A New Algorithm for Training Recurrent Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.09038/) (2016)
- [Massive Online Crowdsourced Study of Subjective and Objective Picture Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02919/) (2015)
- [VideoScore: Building Automatic Metrics to Simulate Fine-grained Human Feedback for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15252/) (2024)
- [LLaVA-UHD: an LMM Perceiving Any Aspect Ratio and High-Resolution Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11703/) (2024)
- [Q-Instruct: Improving Low-level Visual Abilities for Multi-modality Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06783/) (2023)
- [Learning Multi-dimensional Human Preference for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14705/) (2024)
- [Depicting Beyond Scores: Advancing Image Quality Assessment through Multi-modal Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08962/) (2023)
- [Transformer for Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01097/) (2020)
- [Adaptive Image Quality Assessment via Teaching Large Multimodal Model to Compare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19298/) (2024)
- [VILA: Learning Image Aesthetics from User Comments with Vision-Language Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14302/) (2023)
- [Personalized Image Aesthetics Assessment with Rich Attributes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16754/) (2022)
- [Perceptual Image Quality Assessment with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14730/) (2021)
- [AesExpert: Towards Multi-modality Foundation Model for Image Aesthetics Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09624/) (2024)
- [A Comprehensive Study of Multimodal Large Language Models for Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10854/) (2024)
- [UNIAA: A Unified Multi-modal Image Aesthetic Assessment Baseline and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09619/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [ArtiMuse: Fine-Grained Image Aesthetics Assessment with Joint Scoring and Expert-Level Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14533/) (2025)
- [FingER: Content Aware Fine-grained Evaluation with Reasoning for AI-Generated Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10358/) (2025)
- [UniPercept: Towards Unified Perceptual-Level Image Understanding across Aesthetics, Quality, Structure, and Texture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21675/) (2025)
- [Omni-WorldBench: Towards a Comprehensive Interaction-Centric Evaluation for World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22212/) (2026)
- [From Scale to Speed: Adaptive Test-Time Scaling for Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00141/) (2026)
- [Fine-grained Image Aesthetic Assessment: Learning Discriminative Scores from Relative Ranks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03907/) (2026)
- [Taming Hallucinations: Boosting MLLMs' Video Understanding via Counterfactual Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.24271/) (2025)
- [PhotoAgent: Exploratory Visual Aesthetic Planning with Large Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.22809/) (2026)
- [Visual Aesthetic Benchmark: Can Frontier Models Judge Beauty?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12684/) (2026)
- [Q-Hawkeye: Reliable Visual Policy Optimization for Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22920/) (2026)
- [One Model, Two Minds: Task-Conditioned Reasoning for Unified Image Quality and Aesthetic Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19779/) (2026)
- [AesFormer: Transform Everyday Photos into Beautiful Memories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22126/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The rapid expansion of mobile internet has resulted in a substantial increase in user-generated content (UGC) images, thereby making the thorough assessment of UGC images both urgent and essential. Recently, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown great potential in image quality assessment (IQA) and image aesthetic assessment (IAA). Despite this progress, effectively scoring the quality and aesthetics of UGC images still faces two main challenges: 1) A single score is inadequate to capture the hierarchical human perception. 2) How to use MLLMs to output numerical scores, such as mean opinion scores (MOS), remains an open question. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel dataset, named Realistic image Quality and Aesthetic (RealQA), including 14,715 UGC images, each of which is annoted with 10 fine-grained attributes. These attributes span three levels: low level (e.g., image clarity), middle level (e.g., subject integrity) and high level (e.g., composition). Besides, we conduct a series of in-depth and comprehensive investigations into how to effectively predict numerical scores using MLLMs. Surprisingly, by predicting just two extra significant digits, the next token paradigm can achieve SOTA performance. Furthermore, with the help of chain of thought (CoT) combined with the learnt fine-grained attributes, the proposed method can outperform SOTA methods on five public datasets for IQA and IAA with superior interpretability and show strong zero-shot generalization for video quality assessment (VQA). The code and dataset will be released.