# Employing Vision-Language Models for Face Image Quality Assessment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17489 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17489/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Social bias and fairness in VLMs, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 33 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 May 2026.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Social bias and fairness in VLMs](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/social-bias-and-fairness-in-vlms/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [Exploring CLIP for Assessing the Look and Feel of Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12396/) (2022)
- [Joint Face Detection and Alignment using Multi-task Cascaded Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02878/) (2016)
- [Phi-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08905/) (2024)
- [Q-Align: Teaching LMMs for Visual Scoring via Discrete Text-Defined Levels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17090/) (2023)
- [AdaFace: Quality Adaptive Margin for Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00964/) (2022)
- [OBELICS: An Open Web-Scale Filtered Dataset of Interleaved Image-Text Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16527/) (2023)
- [Blind Image Quality Assessment via Vision-Language Correspondence: A Multitask Learning Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14968/) (2023)
- [SER-FIQ: Unsupervised Estimation of Face Image Quality Based on Stochastic Embedding Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09373/) (2020)
- [Towards Open-ended Visual Quality Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16641/) (2024)
- [Face Image Quality Assessment: A Literature Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.01103/) (2020)
- [SDD-FIQA: Unsupervised Face Image Quality Assessment with Similarity Distribution Distance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05977/) (2021)
- [Enhancing Descriptive Image Quality Assessment with A Large-scale Multi-modal Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18842/) (2024)
- [IFQA: Interpretable Face Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07077/) (2022)
- [FaceQAN: Face Image Quality Assessment Through Adversarial Noise Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02127/) (2022)
- [DSL-FIQA: Assessing Facial Image Quality via Dual-Set Degradation Learning and Landmark-Guided Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09622/) (2024)
- [FaceLLM: A Multimodal Large Language Model for Face Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.10300/) (2025)
- [FVQ: A Large-Scale Dataset and an LMM-based Method for Face Video Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09255/) (2025)
- [LVFace: Progressive Cluster Optimization for Large Vision Models in Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13420/) (2025)
- [Face-LLaVA: Facial Expression and Attribute Understanding through Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07198/) (2025)
- [ViT-FIQA: Assessing Face Image Quality using Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13957/) (2025)
- [HERM: Benchmarking and Enhancing Multimodal LLMs for Human-Centric Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06777/) (2024)
- [FaceShield: Explainable Face Anti-Spoofing with Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09415/) (2025)
- [VQualA 2025 Challenge on Face Image Quality Assessment: Methods and Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18445/) (2025)
- [InstructFLIP: Exploring Unified Vision-Language Model for Face Anti-spoofing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12060/) (2025)
- [MGFFD-VLM: Multi-Granularity Prompt Learning for Face Forgery Detection with VLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12232/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Face Image Quality Assessment (FIQA) is a crucial control step in biometric pipelines. It ensures only reliable samples are processed to maintain system accuracy. State-of-the-art FIQA methods achieve high utility but typically operate as "black boxes." They produce scalar scores without human-interpretable justifications. This lack of transparency limits their effectiveness in human-in-the-loop scenarios, such as automated border control, where actionable feedback is essential. In this paper, we investigate the potential of off-the-shelf Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to bridge this gap by performing FIQA in a zero-shot setting. We present a comprehensive evaluation framework for assessing VLM performance. This involves benchmarking traditional FIQA methods through error-versus-reject curves. Additionally, using a diverse set of datasets, ranging from surveillance-oriented to synthetically generated, we analyzed their interpretability, consistency, and robustness to prompt changes. Our results show biometric utility performance depends significantly on architecture, not merely on parameter count. Most VLMs' outputs align with those of traditional methods. We also find that VLM ranking performance and the generated scores may vary across prompts. Our synthetic ablation study shows that while increasing the parameter count can improve internal consistency, it yields worse degradation-detection performance than smaller models. These findings suggest that zero-shot FIQA score estimation using VLMs is promising and could effectively complement conventional FIQA pipelines as an interpretability module. The codes are available at https://github.com/ThEnded32/VLM4FIQA.git.