# HiRQA: Hierarchical Ranking and Quality Alignment for Opinion-Unaware Image Quality Assessment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15130 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15130/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 61 of its 101 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 61)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [SwinIR: Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10257/) (2021)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [MUSIQ: Multi-scale Image Quality Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05997/) (2021)
- [Exploring CLIP for Assessing the Look and Feel of Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12396/) (2022)
- [Real-ESRGAN: Training Real-World Blind Super-Resolution with Pure Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10833/) (2021)
- [Deep Multi-scale Convolutional Neural Network for Dynamic Scene Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02177/) (2016)
- [Deep Retinex Decomposition for Low-Light Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.04560/) (2018)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Deep Neural Networks for No-Reference and Full-Reference Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01697/) (2016)
- [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)
- [No-Reference Image Quality Assessment via Transformers, Relative Ranking, and Self-Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06858/) (2021)
- [MetaIQA: Deep Meta-learning for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05508/) (2020)
- [AGIQA-3K: An Open Database for AI-Generated Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04717/) (2023)
- [Teaching Large Language Models to Regress Accurate Image Quality Scores using Score Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.11561/) (2025)
- [Uncertainty-Aware Blind Image Quality Assessment in the Laboratory and Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.13983/) (2020)
- [Depicting Beyond Scores: Advancing Image Quality Assessment through Multi-modal Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08962/) (2023)
- [Re-IQA: Unsupervised Learning for Image Quality Assessment in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00451/) (2023)

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

- [NovisVQ: A Streaming Convolutional Neural Network for No-Reference Opinion-Unaware Frame Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.04628/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite significant progress in no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA), dataset biases and reliance on subjective labels continue to hinder their generalization performance. We propose HiRQA (Hierarchical Ranking and Quality Alignment), a self-supervised, opinion-unaware framework that offers a hierarchical, quality-aware embedding through a combination of ranking and contrastive learning. Unlike prior approaches that depend on pristine references or auxiliary modalities at inference time, HiRQA predicts quality scores using only the input image. We introduce a novel higher-order ranking loss that supervises quality predictions through relational ordering across distortion pairs, along with an embedding distance loss that enforces consistency between feature distances and perceptual differences. A training-time contrastive alignment loss, guided by structured textual prompts, further enhances the learned representation. Trained only on synthetic image distortions, HiRQA generalizes to authentic degradations, as demonstrated through comprehensive evaluations on various unseen distortions such as lens flare, haze, motion blur, and low-light conditions. For real-time deployment, we introduce HiRQA-S, a lightweight variant with an inference time of only 3.5 ms per image. Extensive experiments across synthetic and authentic benchmarks validate HiRQA's competitive performance, strong generalization ability, and scalability. The HiRQA model and inference pipeline are available at: https://github.com/uf-robopi/HiRQA.