# Patch Knowledge Transfer for Efficient AI-Generated Image Quality Assessment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05605 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.05605/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Blind Image Quality Assessment via Vision-Language Correspondence: A Multitask Learning Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14968/) (2023)
- [AGIQA-3K: An Open Database for AI-Generated Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04717/) (2023)
- [Re-IQA: Unsupervised Learning for Image Quality Assessment in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00451/) (2023)
- [AIGCIQA2023: A Large-scale Image Quality Assessment Database for AI Generated Images: from the Perspectives of Quality, Authenticity and Correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00211/) (2023)
- [A Perceptual Quality Assessment Exploration for AIGC Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12618/) (2023)
- [AIGIQA-20K: A Large Database for AI-Generated Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03407/) (2024)
- [PKU-I2IQA: An Image-to-Image Quality Assessment Database for AI Generated Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15556/) (2023)
- [CLIP-AGIQA: Boosting the Performance of AI-Generated Image Quality Assessment with CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15098/) (2024)
- [Bringing Textual Prompt to AI-Generated Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18714/) (2024)
- [PSCR: Patches Sampling-based Contrastive Regression for AIGC Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05897/) (2023)
- [Adaptive Mixed-Scale Feature Fusion Network for Blind AI-Generated Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15163/) (2024)
- [AI-Generated Image Quality Assessment Based on Task-Specific Prompt and Multi-Granularity Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16087/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the rapid advancement of image generation technologies, perceptual quality assessment of AI-generated images has emerged as a crucial research direction in computer vision. The core challenge of this task lies in achieving efficient quality assessment for massive generated images. Current mainstream approaches exhibit two key limitations: 1) Methods employing complex feature extraction strategies, while improving performance, incur prohibitive computational costs that hinder real-time inference; 2) Simple image scaling-based solutions, despite their computational efficiency, demonstrate significantly inferior assessment accuracy. To address this critical issue, we propose Patch Knowledge Transfer (PKT), a knowledge distillation-based optimization framework that achieves synergistic optimization of visual representation capability and inference efficiency through an innovative multi-level knowledge transfer mechanism. Specifically, we design a dual-model architecture: a teacher model with local-global hybrid processing provides high-quality supervision signals, while a student model relying solely on global processing efficiently inherits the teacher's representation capacity through multi-level supervision. Extensive experiments conducted on 4 AIGIQA databases demonstrate that the PKT framework enables the student model to maintain performance comparable to the teacher while reducing computational costs by 67.7%. Furthermore, compared to existing methods, our approach achieves a superior balance between model efficiency and assessment accuracy.