# TIQA: Human-Aligned Perceptual Text Quality Assessment in Generated Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.07119 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07119/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [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)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [A Survey on LLM-as-a-Judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15594/) (2024)
- [Pick-a-Pic: An Open Dataset of User Preferences for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01569/) (2023)
- [GLM-4.5V and GLM-4.1V-Thinking: Towards Versatile Multimodal Reasoning with Scalable Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01006/) (2025)
- [NIMA: Neural Image Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.05424/) (2017)
- [TextDiffuser: Diffusion Models as Text Painters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10855/) (2023)
- [TOPIQ: A Top-down Approach from Semantics to Distortions for Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03060/) (2023)
- [AnyText: Multilingual Visual Text Generation And Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03054/) (2023)
- [Teaching Large Language Models to Regress Accurate Image Quality Scores using Score Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.11561/) (2025)
- [Show, Attend and Read: A Simple and Strong Baseline for Irregular Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00751/) (2018)
- [Depicting Beyond Scores: Advancing Image Quality Assessment through Multi-modal Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08962/) (2023)
- [Adaptive Image Quality Assessment via Teaching Large Multimodal Model to Compare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19298/) (2024)
- [Q-Eval-100K: Evaluating Visual Quality and Alignment Level for Text-to-Vision Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02357/) (2025)
- [Type-R: Automatically Retouching Typos for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18159/) (2024)
- [STRICT: Stress Test of Rendering Images Containing Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18985/) (2025)
- [TextInVision: Text and Prompt Complexity Driven Visual Text Generation Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13730/) (2025)
- [TypeScore: A Text Fidelity Metric for Text-to-Image Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02437/) (2024)

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

- [UltraText Bench: A Comprehensive Bilingual Benchmark for Evaluating Visual Text Rendering in Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.09823/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent text-to-image models have improved global realism, but text rendering remains a persistent failure mode: images may look convincing overall, yet local typography often contains malformed glyphs, broken strokes, irregular spacing, and other artifacts that humans heavily penalize. We formulate Text-in-Image Quality Assessment (TIQA), a no-reference task that estimates a human-aligned perceptual quality score for detected text regions while disentangling visual text quality from semantic correctness. To support this setting, we introduce two datasets. TIQA-Crops contains 120k text crops from 36k AI-generated images produced by 12 generators, with 10k mean-opinion-score (MOS) labels and 110k proxy labels for pretraining. TIQA-Images contains 1,500 text-heavy images from 10 recent generators, including proprietary systems, with paired overall-quality and text-quality subjective scores. We also propose ANTIQA, a lightweight predictor with text-specific inductive biases. Across crop-level and image-level evaluations, ANTIQA achieves the best alignment with human judgments, reaching PLCC/SROCC of 0.942/0.935 on TIQA-Crops and 0.842/0.837 for text-quality MOS on unseen generators in TIQA-Images. In best-of-5 AI-generated image ranking, ANTIQA improves the text quality of the selected image by 0.36 MOS (14%), demonstrating utility for benchmarking, filtering, and generation-time selection. Together, these findings establish perceptual text quality as a distinct evaluation target for modern text-to-image generation.
