# Building Reasonable Inference for Vision-Language Models in Blind Image Quality Assessment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09555 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09555/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 23 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Dec 2025.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [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)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10560/) (2022)
- [Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05101/) (2017)
- [MUSIQ: Multi-scale Image Quality Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05997/) (2021)
- [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)
- [TOPIQ: A Top-down Approach from Semantics to Distortions for Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03060/) (2023)
- [Massive Online Crowdsourced Study of Subjective and Objective Picture Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02919/) (2015)
- [mPLUG-2: A Modularized Multi-modal Foundation Model Across Text, Image and Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00402/) (2023)
- [Q-Instruct: Improving Low-level Visual Abilities for Multi-modality Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06783/) (2023)
- [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)
- [ARNIQA: Learning Distortion Manifold for Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14918/) (2023)
- [Backward Lens: Projecting Language Model Gradients into the Vocabulary Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12865/) (2024)
- [Q-Ground: Image Quality Grounding with Large Multi-modality Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17035/) (2024)
- [SEAGULL: No-reference Image Quality Assessment for Regions of Interest via Vision-Language Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10161/) (2024)

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

- [Understanding Pure Textual Reasoning for Blind Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02441/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent progress in BIQA has been driven by VLMs, whose semantic reasoning abilities suggest that they might extract visual features, generate descriptive text, and infer quality in a human-like manner. However, these models often produce textual descriptions that contradict their final quality predictions, and the predicted scores can change unstably during inference - behaviors not aligned with human reasoning. To understand these issues, we analyze the factors that cause contradictory assessments and instability. We first estimate the relationship between the final quality predictions and the generated visual features, finding that the predictions are not fully grounded in the features and that the logical connection between them is weak. Moreover, decoding intermediate VLM layers shows that the model frequently relies on a limited set of candidate tokens, which contributes to prediction instability. To encourage more human-like reasoning, we introduce a two-stage tuning method that explicitly separates visual perception from quality inference. In the first stage, the model learns visual features; in the second, it infers quality solely from these features. Experiments on SPAQ and KONIQ demonstrate that our approach reduces prediction instability from 22.00% to 12.39% and achieves average gains of 0.3124/0.3507 in SRCC/PLCC across LIVE, CSIQ, SPAQ, and KONIQ compared to the baseline. Further analyses show that our method improves both stability and the reliability of the inference process.