# QualiRAG: Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Visual Quality Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.18195 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18195/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal RAG, one of 15 directions in Retrieval-augmented generation.
- Builds on 51 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Jan 2026.

## Placed in

- Retrieval-augmented generation / [Multimodal RAG](https://mlsanity.com/rag/multimodal-rag/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10997/) (2023)
- [InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10479/) (2025)
- [VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17982/) (2023)
- [InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18265/) (2025)
- [Unsupervised Dense Information Retrieval with Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09118/) (2021)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Exploring Video Quality Assessment on User Generated Contents from Aesthetic and Technical Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.04894/) (2022)
- [mPLUG-Owl3: Towards Long Image-Sequence Understanding in Multi-Modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04840/) (2024)
- [Improving Video Generation with Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13918/) (2025)
- [Q-Bench: A Benchmark for General-Purpose Foundation Models on Low-level Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14181/) (2023)
- [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)
- [FAST-VQA: Efficient End-to-end Video Quality Assessment with Fragment Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02595/) (2022)
- [PIPAL: a Large-Scale Image Quality Assessment Dataset for Perceptual Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12142/) (2020)
- [No-Reference Image Quality Assessment via Transformers, Relative Ranking, and Self-Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06858/) (2021)
- [Q-Instruct: Improving Low-level Visual Abilities for Multi-modality Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06783/) (2023)
- [Patch-VQ: 'Patching Up' the Video Quality Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13544/) (2020)
- [AGIQA-3K: An Open Database for AI-Generated Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04717/) (2023)
- [Video-RAG: Visually-aligned Retrieval-Augmented Long Video Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13093/) (2024)
- [A Deep Learning based No-reference Quality Assessment Model for UGC Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14047/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [LEIQ-Assessor: Multi-dimensional Quality Assessment of Low-light Enhanced Images via Multi-task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.29752/) (2026)
- [PCQA-R1: Advancing Generalized 3D Point Cloud Quality Assessment with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.18627/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Visual quality assessment (VQA) is increasingly shifting from scalar score prediction toward interpretable quality understanding -- a paradigm that demands textitfine-grained spatiotemporal perception and textitauxiliary contextual information. Current approaches rely on supervised fine-tuning or reinforcement learning on curated instruction datasets, which involve labor-intensive annotation and are prone to dataset-specific biases. To address these challenges, we propose QualiRAG, a textittraining-free Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework that systematically leverages the latent perceptual knowledge of large multimodal models (LMMs) for visual quality perception. Unlike conventional RAG that retrieves from static corpora, QualiRAG dynamically generates auxiliary knowledge by decomposing questions into structured requests and constructing four complementary knowledge sources: textitvisual metadata, textitsubject localization, textitglobal quality summaries, and textitlocal quality descriptions, followed by relevance-aware retrieval for evidence-grounded reasoning. Extensive experiments show that QualiRAG achieves substantial improvements over open-source general-purpose LMMs and VQA-finetuned LMMs on visual quality understanding tasks, and delivers competitive performance on visual quality comparison tasks, demonstrating robust quality assessment capabilities without any task-specific training. The code will be publicly available at https://github.com/clh124/QualiRAG.