# Exploring Instruction Data Quality for Explainable Image Quality Assessment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03880 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03880/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 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 33 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Oct 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 33)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10479/) (2025)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [Image Quality Assessment: Unifying Structure and Texture Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07728/) (2020)
- [MANIQA: Multi-dimension Attention Network for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08958/) (2022)
- [Multilingual E5 Text Embeddings: A Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05672/) (2024)
- [From Quantity to Quality: Boosting LLM Performance with Self-Guided Data Selection for Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12032/) (2023)
- [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)
- [FAST-VQA: Efficient End-to-end Video Quality Assessment with Fragment Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02595/) (2022)
- [Q-Instruct: Improving Low-level Visual Abilities for Multi-modality Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06783/) (2023)
- [Skill-it! A Data-Driven Skills Framework for Understanding and Training Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14430/) (2023)
- [Towards Open-ended Visual Quality Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16641/) (2024)
- [Perplexed by Perplexity: Perplexity-Based Data Pruning With Small Reference Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20541/) (2024)
- [VisualQuality-R1: Reasoning-Induced Image Quality Assessment via Reinforcement Learning to Rank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14460/) (2025)
- [AesExpert: Towards Multi-modality Foundation Model for Image Aesthetics Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09624/) (2024)
- [Your Vision-Language Model Itself Is a Strong Filter: Towards High-Quality Instruction Tuning with Data Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12501/) (2024)
- [Q-Bench-Video: Benchmarking the Video Quality Understanding of LMMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.20063/) (2024)
- [ICONS: Influence Consensus for Vision-Language Data Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00654/) (2024)
- [LMM-VQA: Advancing Video Quality Assessment with Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14008/) (2024)
- [Textured Mesh Quality Assessment: Large-Scale Dataset and Deep Learning-based Quality Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02397/) (2022)
- [Concept-skill Transferability-based Data Selection for Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10995/) (2024)
- [GANHead: Towards Generative Animatable Neural Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03950/) (2023)
- [FVQ: A Large-Scale Dataset and an LMM-based Method for Face Video Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09255/) (2025)
- [AGHI-QA: A Subjective-Aligned Dataset and Metric for AI-Generated Human Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.21308/) (2025)
- [The Photographer Eye: Teaching Multimodal Large Language Models to Understand Image Aesthetics like Photographers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18582/) (2025)
- [Filter Images First, Generate Instructions Later: Pre-Instruction Data Selection for Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07591/) (2025)
- [Mastering Collaborative Multi-modal Data Selection: A Focus on Informativeness, Uniqueness, and Representativeness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06293/) (2024)
- [SingingHead: A Large-scale 4D Dataset for Singing Head Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04369/) (2023)
- [LMME3DHF: Benchmarking and Evaluating Multimodal 3D Human Face Generation with LMMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.20466/) (2025)

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

- [VideoAesBench: Benchmarking the Video Aesthetics Perception Capabilities of Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21915/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In recent years, with the rapid development of large multimodal models (LMMs), explainable image quality assessment (IQA) has attracted increasing attention, aiming to understand the perceptual quality problems of images. Existing studies typically construct large-scale instruction tuning datasets to enhance the quality perception capabilities of LMMs, following the data scaling law. However, as the fundamental capabilities of LMMs continue to improve, existing instruction tuning datasets may contain redundant and less challenging samples, resulting in substantial computational costs. In this paper, we investigate whether data quantity remains the dominant factor in LMM instruction tuning for explainable IQA. Based on a strong pre-trained LMM, we observe that randomly selecting a properly sized subset of training data can outperform full-data fine-tuning, indicating substantial redundancy in existing instruction tuning datasets. Motivated by this observation, we propose Q-Selector, a clustering-based data selection framework consisting of three stages: hierarchical LMM-based clustering feature extraction, cluster quota allocation through density and transferability, and SVD-based cluster sampling strategy. Specifically, Q-Selector extracts multi-layer features from the vision encoder, text encoder, and large language model components of LMMs as clustering features. It then determines the sampling quota for each cluster based on inter-cluster transferability and intra-cluster density. Finally, Q-Selector employs a Singular Value Decomposition (SVD)-based sampling strategy to select high-quality instruction data. Experimental results demonstrate that Q-Selector achieves 102.1% and 103.7% of the performance of full-data fine-tuning using only 10% of the training data on explainable IQA and image aesthetics assessment tasks, respectively.