ELIQ: A Label-Free Framework for Quality Assessment of Evolving AI-Generated Images

Generative text-to-image models are advancing at an unprecedented pace, continuously shifting the perceptual quality ceiling and rendering previously collected labels unreliable for newer generations. To address this, we present ELIQ, a Label-free Framework for Quality Assessment of Evolving AI-generated Images. Specifically, ELIQ focuses on visual quality and prompt-image alignment, automatically constructs positive and aspect-specific negative pairs to cover both conventional distortions and AIGC-specific distortion modes, enabling transferable supervision without human annotations. Building on these pairs, ELIQ adapts a pre-trained multimodal model into a quality-aware critic via instruction tuning and predicts two-dimensional quality using lightweight gated fusion and a Quality Query Transformer. Experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that ELIQ consistently outperforms existing label-free methods, generalizes from AI-generated content (AIGC) to user-generated content (UGC) scenarios without modification, and paves the way for scalable and label-free quality assessment under continuously evolving generative models. The code will be released upon publication.

EEmo-Logic: A Unified Dataset and Multi-Stage Framework for Comprehensive Image-Evoked Emotion Assessment

Understanding the multi-dimensional attributes and intensity nuances of image-evoked emotions is pivotal for advancing machine empathy and empowering diverse human-computer interaction applications. However, existing models are still limited to coarse-grained emotion perception or deficient reasoning capabilities. To bridge this gap, we introduce EEmoDB, the largest image-evoked emotion understanding dataset to date. It features $5$ analysis dimensions spanning $5$ distinct task categories, facilitating comprehensive interpretation. Specifically, we compile $1.2M$ question-answering (QA) pairs (EEmoDB-QA) from $125k$ images via automated generation, alongside a $36k$ dataset (EEmoDB-Assess) curated from $25k$ images for fine-grained assessment. Furthermore, we propose EEmo-Logic, an all-in-one multimodal large language model (MLLM) developed via instruction fine-tuning and task-customized group relative preference optimization (GRPO) with novel reward design. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EEmo-Logic achieves robust performance in in-domain and cross-domain datasets, excelling in emotion QA and fine-grained assessment. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/EEmoLogic.

VideoAesBench: Benchmarking the Video Aesthetics Perception Capabilities of Large Multimodal Models

Large multimodal models (LMMs) have demonstrated outstanding capabilities in various visual perception tasks, which has in turn made the evaluation of LMMs significant. However, the capability of video aesthetic quality assessment, which is a fundamental ability for human, remains underexplored for LMMs. To address this, we introduce VideoAesBench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating LMMs' understanding of video aesthetic quality. VideoAesBench has several significant characteristics: (1) Diverse content including 1,804 videos from multiple video sources including user-generated (UGC), AI-generated (AIGC), compressed, robotic-generated (RGC), and game videos. (2) Multiple question formats containing traditional single-choice questions, multi-choice questions, True or False questions, and a novel open-ended questions for video aesthetics description. (3) Holistic video aesthetics dimensions including visual form related questions from 5 aspects, visual style related questions from 4 aspects, and visual affectiveness questions from 3 aspects. Based on VideoAesBench, we benchmark 23 open-source and commercial large multimodal models. Our findings show that current LMMs only contain basic video aesthetics perception ability, their performance remains incomplete and imprecise. We hope our VideoAesBench can be served as a strong testbed and offer insights for explainable video aesthetics assessment.

Decoupling Perception and Calibration: Label-Efficient Image Quality Assessment Framework

Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in image quality assessment (IQA) tasks. However, adapting such large-scale models is computationally expensive and still relies on substantial Mean Opinion Score (MOS) annotations. We argue that for MLLM-based IQA, the core bottleneck lies not in the quality perception capacity of MLLMs, but in MOS scale calibration. Therefore, we propose LEAF, a Label-Efficient Image Quality Assessment Framework that distills perceptual quality priors from an MLLM teacher into a lightweight student regressor, enabling MOS calibration with minimal human supervision. Specifically, the teacher conducts dense supervision through point-wise judgments and pair-wise preferences, with an estimate of decision reliability. Guided by these signals, the student learns the teacher's quality perception patterns through joint distillation and is calibrated on a small MOS subset to align with human annotations. Experiments on both user-generated and AI-generated IQA benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly reduces the need for human annotations while maintaining strong MOS-aligned correlations, making lightweight IQA practical under limited annotation budgets.

Q-Bench-Portrait: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models on Portrait Image Quality Perception

Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on existing low-level vision benchmarks, which primarily focus on generic images. However, their capabilities to perceive and assess portrait images, a domain characterized by distinct structural and perceptual properties, remain largely underexplored. To this end, we introduce Q-Bench-Portrait, the first holistic benchmark specifically designed for portrait image quality perception, comprising 2,765 image-question-answer triplets and featuring (1) diverse portrait image sources, including natural, synthetic distortion, AI-generated, artistic, and computer graphics images; (2) comprehensive quality dimensions, covering technical distortions, AIGC-specific distortions, and aesthetics; and (3) a range of question formats, including single-choice, multiple-choice, true/false, and open-ended questions, at both global and local levels. Based on Q-Bench-Portrait, we evaluate 20 open-source and 5 closed-source MLLMs, revealing that although current models demonstrate some competence in portrait image perception, their performance remains limited and imprecise, with a clear gap relative to human judgments. We hope that the proposed benchmark will foster further research into enhancing the portrait image perception capabilities of both general-purpose and domain-specific MLLMs.

QualiRAG: Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Visual Quality Understanding

Visual quality assessment (VQA) is increasingly shifting from scalar score prediction toward interpretable quality understanding -- a paradigm that demands \textit{fine-grained spatiotemporal perception} and \textit{auxiliary contextual information}. Current approaches rely on supervised fine-tuning or reinforcement learning on curated instruction datasets, which involve labor-intensive annotation and are prone to dataset-specific biases. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{QualiRAG}, a \textit{training-free} \textbf{R}etrieval-\textbf{A}ugmented \textbf{G}eneration \textbf{(RAG)} framework that systematically leverages the latent perceptual knowledge of large multimodal models (LMMs) for visual quality perception. Unlike conventional RAG that retrieves from static corpora, QualiRAG dynamically generates auxiliary knowledge by decomposing questions into structured requests and constructing four complementary knowledge sources: \textit{visual metadata}, \textit{subject localization}, \textit{global quality summaries}, and \textit{local quality descriptions}, followed by relevance-aware retrieval for evidence-grounded reasoning. Extensive experiments show that QualiRAG achieves substantial improvements over open-source general-purpose LMMs and VQA-finetuned LMMs on visual quality understanding tasks, and delivers competitive performance on visual quality comparison tasks, demonstrating robust quality assessment capabilities without any task-specific training. The code will be publicly available at https://github.com/clh124/QualiRAG.

Fine-Grained Human Pose Editing Assessment via Layer-Selective MLLMs

Text-guided human pose editing has gained significant traction in AIGC applications. However,it remains plagued by structural anomalies and generative artifacts. Existing evaluation metrics often isolate authenticity detection from quality assessment, failing to provide fine-grained insights into pose-specific inconsistencies. To address these limitations, we introduce HPE-Bench, a specialized benchmark comprising 1,700 standardized samples from 17 state-of-the-art editing models, offering both authenticity labels and multi-dimensional quality scores. Furthermore, we propose a unified framework based on layer-selective multimodal large language models (MLLMs). By employing contrastive LoRA tuning and a novel layer sensitivity analysis (LSA) mechanism, we identify the optimal feature layer for pose evaluation. Our framework achieves superior performance in both authenticity detection and multi-dimensional quality regression, effectively bridging the gap between forensic detection and quality assessment.

KidVis: Do Multimodal Large Language Models Possess the Visual Perceptual Capabilities of a 6-Year-Old?

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive proficiency in high-level reasoning tasks, such as complex diagrammatic interpretation, it remains an open question whether they possess the fundamental visual primitives comparable to human intuition. To investigate this, we introduce KidVis, a novel benchmark grounded in the theory of human visual development. KidVis deconstructs visual intelligence into six atomic capabilities - Concentration, Tracking, Discrimination, Memory, Spatial, and Closure - already possessed by 6-7 year old children, comprising 10 categories of low-semantic-dependent visual tasks. Evaluating 20 state-of-the-art MLLMs against a human physiological baseline reveals a stark performance disparity. Results indicate that while human children achieve a near-perfect average score of 95.32, the state-of-the-art GPT-5 attains only 67.33. Crucially, we observe a "Scaling Law Paradox": simply increasing model parameters fails to yield linear improvements in these foundational visual capabilities. This study confirms that current MLLMs, despite their reasoning prowess, lack the essential physiological perceptual primitives required for generalized visual intelligence.

Enhancing Image Quality Assessment Ability of LMMs via Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have recently shown remarkable promise in low-level visual perception tasks, particularly in Image Quality Assessment (IQA), demonstrating strong zero-shot capability. However, achieving state-of-the-art performance often requires computationally expensive fine-tuning methods, which aim to align the distribution of quality-related token in output with image quality levels. Inspired by recent training-free works for LMM, we introduce IQARAG, a novel, training-free framework that enhances LMMs' IQA ability. IQARAG leverages Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to retrieve some semantically similar but quality-variant reference images with corresponding Mean Opinion Scores (MOSs) for input image. These retrieved images and input image are integrated into a specific prompt. Retrieved images provide the LMM with a visual perception anchor for IQA task. IQARAG contains three key phases: Retrieval Feature Extraction, Image Retrieval, and Integration & Quality Score Generation. Extensive experiments across multiple diverse IQA datasets, including KADID, KonIQ, LIVE Challenge, and SPAQ, demonstrate that the proposed IQARAG effectively boosts the IQA performance of LMMs, offering a resource-efficient alternative to fine-tuning for quality assessment.

VTONQA: A Multi-Dimensional Quality Assessment Dataset for Virtual Try-on

With the rapid development of e-commerce and digital fashion, image-based virtual try-on (VTON) has attracted increasing attention. However, existing VTON models often suffer from artifacts such as garment distortion and body inconsistency, highlighting the need for reliable quality evaluation of VTON-generated images. To this end, we construct VTONQA, the first multi-dimensional quality assessment dataset specifically designed for VTON, which contains 8,132 images generated by 11 representative VTON models, along with 24,396 mean opinion scores (MOSs) across three evaluation dimensions (i.e., clothing fit, body compatibility, and overall quality). Based on VTONQA, we benchmark both VTON models and a diverse set of image quality assessment (IQA) metrics, revealing the limitations of existing methods and highlighting the value of the proposed dataset. We believe that the VTONQA dataset and corresponding benchmarks will provide a solid foundation for perceptually aligned evaluation, benefiting both the development of quality assessment methods and the advancement of VTON models.