# MR-IQA: A Unified Margin View of Regression and Ranking for Blind Image Quality Assessment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.29760 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.29760/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Qwen3-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21631/) (2025)
- [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)
- [MANIQA: Multi-dimension Attention Network for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08958/) (2022)
- [Q-Align: Teaching LMMs for Visual Scoring via Discrete Text-Defined Levels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17090/) (2023)
- [NIMA: Neural Image Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.05424/) (2017)
- [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)
- [No-Reference Image Quality Assessment via Transformers, Relative Ranking, and Self-Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06858/) (2021)
- [Q-Instruct: Improving Low-level Visual Abilities for Multi-modality Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06783/) (2023)
- [RankIQA: Learning from Rankings for No-reference Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.08347/) (2017)
- [AGIQA-3K: An Open Database for AI-Generated Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04717/) (2023)
- [Teaching Large Language Models to Regress Accurate Image Quality Scores using Score Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.11561/) (2025)
- [Depicting Beyond Scores: Advancing Image Quality Assessment through Multi-modal Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08962/) (2023)
- [Q-Insight: Understanding Image Quality via Visual Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22679/) (2025)
- [ARNIQA: Learning Distortion Manifold for Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14918/) (2023)
- [VisualQuality-R1: Reasoning-Induced Image Quality Assessment via Reinforcement Learning to Rank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14460/) (2025)
- [dipIQ: Blind Image Quality Assessment by Learning-to-Rank Discriminable Image Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06505/) (2019)
- [Adaptive Image Quality Assessment via Teaching Large Multimodal Model to Compare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19298/) (2024)
- [On the Use of Deep Learning for Blind Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05531/) (2016)
- [Learning to Rank for Blind Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1309.0213/) (2013)
- [Reasoning as Representation: Rethinking Visual Reinforcement Learning in Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11369/) (2025)
- [Q-Ponder: A Unified Training Pipeline for Reasoning-based Visual Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05384/) (2025)
- [Zoom-IQA: Image Quality Assessment with Reliable Region-Aware Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02918/) (2026)
- [Rank-smoothed Pairwise Learning In Perceptual Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10893/) (2020)
- [Guiding Perception-Reasoning Closer to Human in Blind Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16484/) (2025)
- [Controllable List-wise Ranking for Universal No-reference Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10566/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Blind image quality assessment (BIQA) is commonly built on two basic learning paradigms: regression and ranking. Regression calibrates absolute scores, whereas ranking recovers quality structure from ordinal relations. Although joint regression-ranking supervision often improves BIQA, the relation between the two paradigms remains largely empirical and underexplored. In this work, we revisit what underlies regression and ranking and identify pairwise relational distance, termed quality margin, as their common bridge. Our derivation shows that, at the objective-optimization level, both paradigms fit quality margins: regression fits margins induced by score endpoints, while ranking fits transformed or sign-level margins through preference probabilities. Motivated by this insight, we propose MR-IQA, a direct quality-margin optimization framework for reinforcement learning (RL)-based BIQA. MR-IQA samples quality scores and optimizes pairwise margin errors as policy rewards, thereby modeling quality structure more explicitly. Experiments on six BIQA benchmarks show competitive general performance, and controlled comparisons demonstrate that MR-IQA achieves the strongest average PLCC/SRCC over regression- or ranking-based RL methods. Our findings provide a new insight into unifying regression and ranking, offering a theoretical basis for understanding quality-structure modeling in BIQA and beyond. Code is available at https://github.com/RobinY99/MR-IQA.