# Seeing Beyond 8bits: Subjective and Objective Quality Assessment of HDR-UGC Videos

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.00938 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00938/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 48 of its 77 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [DAPO: An Open-Source LLM Reinforcement Learning System at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14476/) (2025)
- [SigLIP 2: Multilingual Vision-Language Encoders with Improved Semantic Understanding, Localization, and Dense Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14786/) (2025)
- [SFT Memorizes, RL Generalizes: A Comparative Study of Foundation Model Post-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17161/) (2025)
- [Q-Align: Teaching LMMs for Visual Scoring via Discrete Text-Defined Levels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17090/) (2023)
- [The Entropy Mechanism of Reinforcement Learning for Reasoning Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22617/) (2025)
- [Q-Bench: A Benchmark for General-Purpose Foundation Models on Low-level Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14181/) (2023)
- [SFT or RL? An Early Investigation into Training R1-Like Reasoning Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11468/) (2025)
- [FAST-VQA: Efficient End-to-end Video Quality Assessment with Fragment Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02595/) (2022)
- [Quality Assessment of In-the-Wild Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.00375/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Teaching Large Language Models to Regress Accurate Image Quality Scores using Score Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.11561/) (2025)
- [Large-Scale Study of Perceptual Video Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01761/) (2018)
- [Ovis2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11737/) (2025)
- [Depicting Beyond Scores: Advancing Image Quality Assessment through Multi-modal Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08962/) (2023)
- [Perception-Aware Policy Optimization for Multimodal Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06448/) (2025)
- [Q-Insight: Understanding Image Quality via Visual Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22679/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Towards Open-ended Visual Quality Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16641/) (2024)
- [VisualQuality-R1: Reasoning-Induced Image Quality Assessment via Reinforcement Learning to Rank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14460/) (2025)
- [Adaptive Image Quality Assessment via Teaching Large Multimodal Model to Compare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19298/) (2024)
- [Neighbourhood Representative Sampling for Efficient End-to-end Video Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05357/) (2022)
- [MD-VQA: Multi-Dimensional Quality Assessment for UGC Live Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14933/) (2023)
- [Towards Explainable In-the-Wild Video Quality Assessment: A Database and a Language-Prompted Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12726/) (2023)
- [MLLMs are Deeply Affected by Modality Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18657/) (2025)

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

- [LumaGuide: Distribution Shaping for Training-Free HDR Generation in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.26237/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

High Dynamic Range (HDR) user-generated (UGC) videos are rapidly proliferating across social platforms, yet most perceptual video quality assessment (VQA) systems remain tailored to Standard Dynamic Range (SDR). HDR has a higher bit depth, wide color gamut, and elevated luminance range, exposing distortions such as near-black crushing, highlight clipping, banding, and exposure flicker that amplify UGC artifacts and challenge SDR models. To catalyze progress, we curate Beyond8Bits, a large-scale subjective dataset of 44K videos from 6.5K sources with over 1.5M crowd ratings, spanning diverse scenes, capture conditions, and compression settings. We further introduce HDR-Q, the first Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) for HDR-UGC VQA. We propose (i) a novel HDR-aware vision encoder to produce HDR-sensitive embeddings, and (ii) HDR-Aware Policy Optimization (HAPO), an RL finetuning framework that anchors reasoning to HDR cues. HAPO augments GRPO via an HDR-SDR contrastive KL that encourages token reliance on HDR inputs and a Gaussian weighted regression reward for fine-grained MOS calibration. Across Beyond8Bits and public HDR-VQA benchmarks, HDR-Q delivers state-of-the-art performance.