# Life-IQA: Boosting Blind Image Quality Assessment through GCN-enhanced Layer Interaction and MoE-based Feature Decoupling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19024 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19024/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [Mixtral of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04088/) (2024)
- [GShard: Scaling Giant Models with Conditional Computation and Automatic Sharding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16668/) (2020)
- [MUSIQ: Multi-scale Image Quality Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05997/) (2021)
- [MaxViT: Multi-Axis Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01697/) (2022)
- [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)
- [TOPIQ: A Top-down Approach from Semantics to Distortions for Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03060/) (2023)
- [No-Reference Image Quality Assessment via Transformers, Relative Ranking, and Self-Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06858/) (2021)
- [Re-IQA: Unsupervised Learning for Image Quality Assessment in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00451/) (2023)
- [Transformer for Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01097/) (2020)
- [Blind Quality Assessment for in-the-Wild Images via Hierarchical Feature Fusion and Iterative Mixed Database Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14550/) (2021)
- [Data-Efficient Image Quality Assessment with Attention-Panel Decoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04952/) (2023)
- [Patch-level Routing in Mixture-of-Experts is Provably Sample-efficient for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04073/) (2023)
- [Brainformers: Trading Simplicity for Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00008/) (2023)
- [Robust Mixture-of-Expert Training for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10110/) (2023)
- [Efficient and Effective Weight-Ensembling Mixture of Experts for Multi-Task Model Merging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21804/) (2024)
- [Task-Specific Normalization for Continual Learning of Blind Image Quality Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13429/) (2021)
- [Blind Image Quality Assessment via Transformer Predicted Error Map and Perceptual Quality Token](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09353/) (2023)
- [Forgetting to Remember: A Scalable Incremental Learning Framework for Cross-Task Blind Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07126/) (2022)
- [Vision Language Modeling of Content, Distortion and Appearance for Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09858/) (2024)
- [Image Quality Assessment: Investigating Causal Perceptual Effects with Abductive Counterfactual Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16939/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Blind image quality assessment (BIQA) plays a crucial role in evaluating and optimizing visual experience. Most existing BIQA approaches fuse shallow and deep features extracted from backbone networks, while overlooking the unequal contributions to quality prediction. Moreover, while various vision encoder backbones are widely adopted in BIQA, the effective quality decoding architectures remain underexplored. To address these limitations, this paper investigates the contributions of shallow and deep features to BIQA, and proposes a effective quality feature decoding framework via GCN-enhanced underlinelayerunderlineinteraction and MoE-based underlinefeature dunderlineecoupling, termed (Life-IQA). Specifically, the GCN-enhanced layer interaction module utilizes the GCN-enhanced deepest-layer features as query and the penultimate-layer features as key, value, then performs cross-attention to achieve feature interaction. Moreover, a MoE-based feature decoupling module is proposed to decouple fused representations though different experts specialized for specific distortion types or quality dimensions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Life-IQA shows more favorable balance between accuracy and cost than a vanilla Transformer decoder and achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple BIQA benchmarks.The code is available at: hrefhttps://github.com/TANGLONG2/Life-IQA/tree/maintextttLife-IQA.