# Comparison Drives Preference: Reference-Aware Modeling for AI-Generated Video Quality Assessment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.17074 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17074/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Apr 2026.

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

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03426/) (2018)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [Graph Contrastive Learning with Augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13902/) (2020)
- [MUSIQ: Multi-scale Image Quality Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05997/) (2021)
- [ImageReward: Learning and Evaluating Human Preferences for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05977/) (2023)
- [Exploring CLIP for Assessing the Look and Feel of Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12396/) (2022)
- [Pick-a-Pic: An Open Dataset of User Preferences for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01569/) (2023)
- [Exploring Video Quality Assessment on User Generated Contents from Aesthetic and Technical Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.04894/) (2022)
- [UGC-VQA: Benchmarking Blind Video Quality Assessment for User Generated Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14354/) (2020)
- [Uncertainty-Aware Blind Image Quality Assessment in the Laboratory and Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.13983/) (2020)
- [A Deep Learning based No-reference Quality Assessment Model for UGC Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14047/) (2022)
- [Blindly Assess Quality of In-the-Wild Videos via Quality-aware Pre-training and Motion Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08505/) (2021)
- [Generalized Relation Modeling for Transformer Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16580/) (2023)
- [Blind Quality Assessment for in-the-Wild Images via Hierarchical Feature Fusion and Iterative Mixed Database Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14550/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Graph Neural Networks and Graph Transformers in Computer Vision: A Task-Oriented Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13232/) (2022)
- [Perceptual Video Quality Assessment: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03413/) (2024)
- [Q-Eval-100K: Evaluating Visual Quality and Alignment Level for Text-to-Vision Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02357/) (2025)
- [VPO: Aligning Text-to-Video Generation Models with Prompt Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20491/) (2025)
- [VQ-Insight: Teaching VLMs for AI-Generated Video Quality Understanding via Progressive Visual Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18564/) (2025)
- [Boosting Few-shot Action Recognition with Graph-guided Hybrid Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09346/) (2023)
- [STEP: Enhancing Video-LLMs' Compositional Reasoning by Spatio-Temporal Graph-guided Self-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00161/) (2024)
- [Exploring AIGC Video Quality: A Focus on Visual Harmony, Video-Text Consistency and Domain Distribution Gap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13573/) (2024)
- [Content-Rich AIGC Video Quality Assessment via Intricate Text Alignment and Motion-Aware Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04076/) (2025)
- [VE-Bench: Subjective-Aligned Benchmark Suite for Text-Driven Video Editing Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11481/) (2024)
- [T2VEval: Benchmark Dataset and Objective Evaluation Method for T2V-generated Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.08545/) (2025)
- [Towards Holistic Visual Quality Assessment of AI-Generated Videos: A LLM-Based Multi-Dimensional Evaluation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04715/) (2025)
- [Advancing Video Quality Assessment for AIGC](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14888/) (2024)
- [MDS-VQA: Model-Informed Data Selection for Video Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11525/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The rapid advancement of generative models has led to a growing volume of AI-generated videos, making the automatic quality assessment of such videos increasingly important. Existing AI-generated content video quality assessment (AIGC-VQA) methods typically estimate visual quality by analyzing each video independently, ignoring potential relationships among videos. In this work, we revisit AIGC-VQA from an inter-video perspective and formulate it as a reference-aware evaluation problem. Through this formulation, quality assessment is guided not only by intrinsic video characteristics but also by comparisons with related videos, which is more consistent with human perception. To validate its effectiveness, we propose Reference-aware Video Quality Assessment (RefVQA), which utilizes a query-centered reference graph to organize semantically related samples and performs graph-guided difference aggregation from the reference nodes to the query node. Experiments on existing datasets demonstrate that our proposed RefVQA outperforms state-of-the-art methods across multiple quality dimensions, with strong generalization ability validated by cross-dataset evaluation. These results highlight the effectiveness of the proposed reference-based formulation and suggest its potential to advance AIGC-VQA.