NTIRE 2024 Challenge on Short-form UGC Video Quality Assessment: Methods and Results

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2024 Challenge on Shortform UGC Video Quality Assessment (S-UGC VQA), where various excellent solutions are submitted and evaluated on the collected dataset KVQ from popular short-form video platform, i.e., Kuaishou/Kwai Platform. The KVQ database is divided into three parts, including 2926 videos for training, 420 videos for validation, and 854 videos for testing. The purpose is to build new benchmarks and advance the development of S-UGC VQA. The competition had 200 participants and 13 teams submitted valid solutions for the final testing phase. The proposed solutions achieved state-of-the-art performances for S-UGC VQA. The project can be found at https://github.com/lixinustc/KVQChallenge-CVPR-NTIRE2024.

AIGIQA-20K: A Large Database for AI-Generated Image Quality Assessment

With the rapid advancements in AI-Generated Content (AIGC), AI-Generated Images (AIGIs) have been widely applied in entertainment, education, and social media. However, due to the significant variance in quality among different AIGIs, there is an urgent need for models that consistently match human subjective ratings. To address this issue, we organized a challenge towards AIGC quality assessment on NTIRE 2024 that extensively considers 15 popular generative models, utilizing dynamic hyper-parameters (including classifier-free guidance, iteration epochs, and output image resolution), and gather subjective scores that consider perceptual quality and text-to-image alignment altogether comprehensively involving 21 subjects. This approach culminates in the creation of the largest fine-grained AIGI subjective quality database to date with 20,000 AIGIs and 420,000 subjective ratings, known as AIGIQA-20K. Furthermore, we conduct benchmark experiments on this database to assess the correspondence between 16 mainstream AIGI quality models and human perception. We anticipate that this large-scale quality database will inspire robust quality indicators for AIGIs and propel the evolution of AIGC for vision. The database is released on https://www.modelscope.cn/datasets/lcysyzxdxc/AIGCQA-30K-Image.

Subjective-Aligned Dataset and Metric for Text-to-Video Quality Assessment

With the rapid development of generative models, Artificial Intelligence-Generated Contents (AIGC) have exponentially increased in daily lives. Among them, Text-to-Video (T2V) generation has received widespread attention. Though many T2V models have been released for generating high perceptual quality videos, there is still lack of a method to evaluate the quality of these videos quantitatively. To solve this issue, we establish the largest-scale Text-to-Video Quality Assessment DataBase (T2VQA-DB) to date. The dataset is composed of 10,000 videos generated by 9 different T2V models. We also conduct a subjective study to obtain each video's corresponding mean opinion score. Based on T2VQA-DB, we propose a novel transformer-based model for subjective-aligned Text-to-Video Quality Assessment (T2VQA). The model extracts features from text-video alignment and video fidelity perspectives, then it leverages the ability of a large language model to give the prediction score. Experimental results show that T2VQA outperforms existing T2V metrics and SOTA video quality assessment models. Quantitative analysis indicates that T2VQA is capable of giving subjective-align predictions, validating its effectiveness. The dataset and code will be released at https://github.com/QMME/T2VQA.

Subjective-Aligned Dateset and Metric for Text-to-Video Quality Assessment

With the rapid development of generative models, Artificial Intelligence-Generated Contents (AIGC) have exponentially increased in daily lives. Among them, Text-to-Video (T2V) generation has received widespread attention. Though many T2V models have been released for generating high perceptual quality videos, there is still lack of a method to evaluate the quality of these videos quantitatively. To solve this issue, we establish the largest-scale Text-to-Video Quality Assessment DataBase (T2VQA-DB) to date. The dataset is composed of 10,000 videos generated by 9 different T2V models. We also conduct a subjective study to obtain each video's corresponding mean opinion score. Based on T2VQA-DB, we propose a novel transformer-based model for subjective-aligned Text-to-Video Quality Assessment (T2VQA). The model extracts features from text-video alignment and video fidelity perspectives, then it leverages the ability of a large language model to give the prediction score. Experimental results show that T2VQA outperforms existing T2V metrics and SOTA video quality assessment models. Quantitative analysis indicates that T2VQA is capable of giving subjective-align predictions, validating its effectiveness. The dataset and code will be released at https://github.com/QMME/T2VQA.

Towards Open-ended Visual Quality Comparison

Comparative settings (e.g. pairwise choice, listwise ranking) have been adopted by a wide range of subjective studies for image quality assessment (IQA), as it inherently standardizes the evaluation criteria across different observers and offer more clear-cut responses. In this work, we extend the edge of emerging large multi-modality models (LMMs) to further advance visual quality comparison into open-ended settings, that 1) can respond to open-range questions on quality comparison; 2) can provide detailed reasonings beyond direct answers. To this end, we propose the Co-Instruct. To train this first-of-its-kind open-source open-ended visual quality comparer, we collect the Co-Instruct-562K dataset, from two sources: (a) LLM-merged single image quality description, (b) GPT-4V "teacher" responses on unlabeled data. Furthermore, to better evaluate this setting, we propose the MICBench, the first benchmark on multi-image comparison for LMMs. We demonstrate that Co-Instruct not only achieves in average 30% higher accuracy than state-of-the-art open-source LMMs, but also outperforms GPT-4V (its teacher), on both existing related benchmarks and the proposed MICBench. Our model is published at https://huggingface.co/q-future/co-instruct.

MISC: Ultra-low Bitrate Image Semantic Compression Driven by Large Multimodal Model

With the evolution of storage and communication protocols, ultra-low bitrate image compression has become a highly demanding topic. However, existing compression algorithms must sacrifice either consistency with the ground truth or perceptual quality at ultra-low bitrate. In recent years, the rapid development of the Large Multimodal Model (LMM) has made it possible to balance these two goals. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a method called Multimodal Image Semantic Compression (MISC), which consists of an LMM encoder for extracting the semantic information of the image, a map encoder to locate the region corresponding to the semantic, an image encoder generates an extremely compressed bitstream, and a decoder reconstructs the image based on the above information. Experimental results show that our proposed MISC is suitable for compressing both traditional Natural Sense Images (NSIs) and emerging AI-Generated Images (AIGIs) content. It can achieve optimal consistency and perception results while saving 50% bitrate, which has strong potential applications in the next generation of storage and communication. The code will be released on https://github.com/lcysyzxdxc/MISC.

A Benchmark for Multi-modal Foundation Models on Low-level Vision: from Single Images to Pairs

The rapid development of Multi-modality Large Language Models (MLLMs) has navigated a paradigm shift in computer vision, moving towards versatile foundational models. However, evaluating MLLMs in low-level visual perception and understanding remains a yet-to-explore domain. To this end, we design benchmark settings to emulate human language responses related to low-level vision: the low-level visual perception (A1) via visual question answering related to low-level attributes (e.g. clarity, lighting); and the low-level visual description (A2), on evaluating MLLMs for low-level text descriptions. Furthermore, given that pairwise comparison can better avoid ambiguity of responses and has been adopted by many human experiments, we further extend the low-level perception-related question-answering and description evaluations of MLLMs from single images to image pairs. Specifically, for perception (A1), we carry out the LLVisionQA+ dataset, comprising 2,990 single images and 1,999 image pairs each accompanied by an open-ended question about its low-level features; for description (A2), we propose the LLDescribe+ dataset, evaluating MLLMs for low-level descriptions on 499 single images and 450 pairs. Additionally, we evaluate MLLMs on assessment (A3) ability, i.e. predicting score, by employing a softmax-based approach to enable all MLLMs to generate quantifiable quality ratings, tested against human opinions in 7 image quality assessment (IQA) datasets. With 24 MLLMs under evaluation, we demonstrate that several MLLMs have decent low-level visual competencies on single images, but only GPT-4V exhibits higher accuracy on pairwise comparisons than single image evaluations (like humans). We hope that our benchmark will motivate further research into uncovering and enhancing these nascent capabilities of MLLMs. Datasets will be available at https://github.com/Q-Future/Q-Bench.

AesBench: An Expert Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models on Image Aesthetics Perception

With collective endeavors, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are undergoing a flourishing development. However, their performances on image aesthetics perception remain indeterminate, which is highly desired in real-world applications. An obvious obstacle lies in the absence of a specific benchmark to evaluate the effectiveness of MLLMs on aesthetic perception. This blind groping may impede the further development of more advanced MLLMs with aesthetic perception capacity. To address this dilemma, we propose AesBench, an expert benchmark aiming to comprehensively evaluate the aesthetic perception capacities of MLLMs through elaborate design across dual facets. (1) We construct an Expert-labeled Aesthetics Perception Database (EAPD), which features diversified image contents and high-quality annotations provided by professional aesthetic experts. (2) We propose a set of integrative criteria to measure the aesthetic perception abilities of MLLMs from four perspectives, including Perception (AesP), Empathy (AesE), Assessment (AesA) and Interpretation (AesI). Extensive experimental results underscore that the current MLLMs only possess rudimentary aesthetic perception ability, and there is still a significant gap between MLLMs and humans. We hope this work can inspire the community to engage in deeper explorations on the aesthetic potentials of MLLMs. Source data will be available at https://github.com/yipoh/AesBench.

Towards A Better Metric for Text-to-Video Generation

Generative models have demonstrated remarkable capability in synthesizing high-quality text, images, and videos. For video generation, contemporary text-to-video models exhibit impressive capabilities, crafting visually stunning videos. Nonetheless, evaluating such videos poses significant challenges. Current research predominantly employs automated metrics such as FVD, IS, and CLIP Score. However, these metrics provide an incomplete analysis, particularly in the temporal assessment of video content, thus rendering them unreliable indicators of true video quality. Furthermore, while user studies have the potential to reflect human perception accurately, they are hampered by their time-intensive and laborious nature, with outcomes that are often tainted by subjective bias. In this paper, we investigate the limitations inherent in existing metrics and introduce a novel evaluation pipeline, the Text-to-Video Score (T2VScore). This metric integrates two pivotal criteria: (1) Text-Video Alignment, which scrutinizes the fidelity of the video in representing the given text description, and (2) Video Quality, which evaluates the video's overall production caliber with a mixture of experts. Moreover, to evaluate the proposed metrics and facilitate future improvements on them, we present the TVGE dataset, collecting human judgements of 2,543 text-to-video generated videos on the two criteria. Experiments on the TVGE dataset demonstrate the superiority of the proposed T2VScore on offering a better metric for text-to-video generation.