# Decoupling Perception and Calibration: Label-Efficient Image Quality Assessment Framework

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20689 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20689/

## 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 27 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Jan 2026.

## 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, 27 of 27)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [PieAPP: Perceptual Image-Error Assessment through Pairwise Preference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02067/) (2018)
- [AGIQA-3K: An Open Database for AI-Generated Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04717/) (2023)
- [Re-IQA: Unsupervised Learning for Image Quality Assessment in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00451/) (2023)
- [Image Quality Assessment using Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13266/) (2021)
- [ARNIQA: Learning Distortion Manifold for Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14918/) (2023)
- [Hallucinated-IQA: No-Reference Image Quality Assessment via Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01681/) (2018)
- [A Comprehensive Study of Multimodal Large Language Models for Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10854/) (2024)
- [AIGIQA-20K: A Large Database for AI-Generated Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03407/) (2024)
- [Quality-Aware Image-Text Alignment for Opinion-Unaware Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11176/) (2024)
- [Large Multi-modality Model Assisted AI-Generated Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17762/) (2024)
- [LMM4LMM: Benchmarking and Evaluating Large-multimodal Image Generation with LMMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08358/) (2025)
- [LMM4Edit: Benchmarking and Evaluating Multimodal Image Editing with LMMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16193/) (2025)
- [Quality-aware Pre-trained Models for Blind Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00521/) (2023)
- [SEAGULL: No-reference Image Quality Assessment for Regions of Interest via Vision-Language Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10161/) (2024)
- [AGHI-QA: A Subjective-Aligned Dataset and Metric for AI-Generated Human Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.21308/) (2025)
- [Opinion-Unaware Blind Image Quality Assessment using Multi-Scale Deep Feature Statistics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18790/) (2024)
- [Self-Evolving Vision-Language Models for Image Quality Assessment via Voting and Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25787/) (2025)
- [Transformer-based No-Reference Image Quality Assessment via Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06995/) (2023)
- [Vision-Language Consistency Guided Multi-modal Prompt Learning for Blind AI Generated Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16641/) (2024)
- [Deep Shape-Texture Statistics for Completely Blind Image Quality Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08107/) (2024)

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

- [Preference-Guided Debiasing for No-Reference Enhancement Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20086/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in image quality assessment (IQA) tasks. However, adapting such large-scale models is computationally expensive and still relies on substantial Mean Opinion Score (MOS) annotations. We argue that for MLLM-based IQA, the core bottleneck lies not in the quality perception capacity of MLLMs, but in MOS scale calibration. Therefore, we propose LEAF, a Label-Efficient Image Quality Assessment Framework that distills perceptual quality priors from an MLLM teacher into a lightweight student regressor, enabling MOS calibration with minimal human supervision. Specifically, the teacher conducts dense supervision through point-wise judgments and pair-wise preferences, with an estimate of decision reliability. Guided by these signals, the student learns the teacher's quality perception patterns through joint distillation and is calibrated on a small MOS subset to align with human annotations. Experiments on both user-generated and AI-generated IQA benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly reduces the need for human annotations while maintaining strong MOS-aligned correlations, making lightweight IQA practical under limited annotation budgets.