Daily Papers

Image Quality Assessment (IQA) predicts perceptual quality scores consistent with human judgments. Recent RL-based IQA methods built on MLLMs focus on generating visual quality descriptions and scores, ignoring two key reliability limitations: (i) although the model's prediction stability varies significantly across training samples, existing GRPO-based methods apply uniform advantage weighting, thereby amplifying noisy signals from unstable samples in gradient updates; (ii) most works emphasize text-grounded reasoning over images while overlooking the model's visual perception ability of image content. In this paper, we propose Q-Hawkeye, an RL-based reliable visual policy optimization framework that redesigns the learning signal through unified Uncertainty-Aware Dynamic Optimization and Perception-Aware Optimization. Q-Hawkeye estimates predictive uncertainty using the variance of predicted scores across multiple rollouts and leverages this uncertainty to reweight each sample's update strength, stabilizing policy optimization. To strengthen perceptual reliability, we construct paired inputs of degraded images and their original images and introduce an Implicit Perception Loss that constrains the model to ground its quality judgments in genuine visual evidence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Q-Hawkeye outperforms state-of-the-art methods and generalizes better across multiple datasets. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/AMAP-ML/Q-Hawkeye.

DeepSeek-R1 has demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in incentivizing reasoning and generalization capabilities of large language models (LLMs) through reinforcement learning. Nevertheless, the potential of reasoning-induced computational modeling has not been thoroughly explored in the context of image quality assessment (IQA), a task critically dependent on visual reasoning. In this paper, we introduce VisualQuality-R1, a reasoning-induced no-reference IQA (NR-IQA) model, and we train it with reinforcement learning to rank, a learning algorithm tailored to the intrinsically relative nature of visual quality. Specifically, for a pair of images, we employ group relative policy optimization to generate multiple quality scores for each image. These estimates are then used to compute comparative probabilities of one image having higher quality than the other under the Thurstone model. Rewards for each quality estimate are defined using continuous fidelity measures rather than discretized binary labels. Extensive experiments show that the proposed VisualQuality-R1 consistently outperforms discriminative deep learning-based NR-IQA models as well as a recent reasoning-induced quality regression method. Moreover, VisualQuality-R1 is capable of generating contextually rich, human-aligned quality descriptions, and supports multi-dataset training without requiring perceptual scale realignment. These features make VisualQuality-R1 especially well-suited for reliably measuring progress in a wide range of image processing tasks like super-resolution and image generation.

In this paper, we introduced a novel text-to-avatar generation method that separately generates the human body and the clothes and allows high-quality animation on the generated avatar. While recent advancements in text-to-avatar generation have yielded diverse human avatars from text prompts, these methods typically combine all elements-clothes, hair, and body-into a single 3D representation. Such an entangled approach poses challenges for downstream tasks like editing or animation. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel disentangled 3D avatar representation named Sequentially Offset-SMPL (SO-SMPL), building upon the SMPL model. SO-SMPL represents the human body and clothes with two separate meshes, but associates them with offsets to ensure the physical alignment between the body and the clothes. Then, we design an Score Distillation Sampling(SDS)-based distillation framework to generate the proposed SO-SMPL representation from text prompts. In comparison with existing text-to-avatar methods, our approach not only achieves higher exture and geometry quality and better semantic alignment with text prompts, but also significantly improves the visual quality of character animation, virtual try-on, and avatar editing. Our project page is at https://shanemankiw.github.io/SO-SMPL/.

In this paper, we presents a novel method for improving text-to-image generation by combining Large Language Models (LLMs) with diffusion models, a hybrid approach aimed at achieving both higher quality and efficiency in image synthesis from text descriptions. Our approach introduces a new dynamic KL-weighting strategy to optimize the diffusion process, along with incorporating semantic understanding from pre-trained LLMs to guide the generation process. The proposed method significantly improves both the visual quality and alignment of generated images with text descriptions, addressing challenges such as computational inefficiency, instability in training, and robustness to textual variability. We evaluate our method on the COCO dataset and demonstrate its superior performance over traditional GAN-based models, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Extensive experiments, including ablation studies and human evaluations, confirm that our method outperforms existing approaches in terms of image realism, relevance to the input text, and overall aesthetic quality. Our approach also shows promise in scalability to other multimodal tasks, making it a versatile solution for a wide range of generative applications.

Image codecs are typically optimized to trade-off bitrate \vs distortion metrics. At low bitrates, this leads to compression artefacts which are easily perceptible, even when training with perceptual or adversarial losses. To improve image quality and remove dependency on the bitrate, we propose to decode with iterative diffusion models. We condition the decoding process on a vector-quantized image representation, as well as a global image description to provide additional context. We dub our model PerCo for 'perceptual compression', and compare it to state-of-the-art codecs at rates from 0.1 down to 0.003 bits per pixel. The latter rate is more than an order of magnitude smaller than those considered in most prior work, compressing a 512x768 Kodak image with less than 153 bytes. Despite this ultra-low bitrate, our approach maintains the ability to reconstruct realistic images. We find that our model leads to reconstructions with state-of-the-art visual quality as measured by FID and KID. As predicted by rate-distortion-perception theory, visual quality is less dependent on the bitrate than previous methods.

Text-guided image editing has seen rapid progress in natural image domains, but its adaptation to medical imaging remains limited and lacks standardized evaluation. Clinically, such editing holds promise for simulating surgical outcomes, creating personalized teaching materials, and enhancing patient communication. To bridge this gap, we introduce MedEBench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating text-guided medical image editing. It consists of 1,182 clinically sourced image-prompt triplets spanning 70 tasks across 13 anatomical regions. MedEBench offers three key contributions: (1) a clinically relevant evaluation framework covering Editing Accuracy, Contextual Preservation, and Visual Quality, supported by detailed descriptions of expected change and ROI (Region of Interest) masks; (2) a systematic comparison of seven state-of-the-art models, revealing common failure patterns; and (3) a failure analysis protocol based on attention grounding, using IoU between attention maps and ROIs to identify mislocalization. MedEBench provides a solid foundation for developing and evaluating reliable, clinically meaningful medical image editing systems.

Text-driven generation models are flourishing in video generation and editing. However, face-centric text-to-video generation remains a challenge due to the lack of a suitable dataset containing high-quality videos and highly relevant texts. This paper presents CelebV-Text, a large-scale, diverse, and high-quality dataset of facial text-video pairs, to facilitate research on facial text-to-video generation tasks. CelebV-Text comprises 70,000 in-the-wild face video clips with diverse visual content, each paired with 20 texts generated using the proposed semi-automatic text generation strategy. The provided texts are of high quality, describing both static and dynamic attributes precisely. The superiority of CelebV-Text over other datasets is demonstrated via comprehensive statistical analysis of the videos, texts, and text-video relevance. The effectiveness and potential of CelebV-Text are further shown through extensive self-evaluation. A benchmark is constructed with representative methods to standardize the evaluation of the facial text-to-video generation task. All data and models are publicly available.

Advancing machine visual reasoning requires a deeper understanding of how Vision-Language Models (VLMs) process and interpret complex visual patterns. This work introduces a novel, cognitively-inspired evaluation framework to systematically analyze VLM reasoning on natural image-based Bongard Problems. We propose three structured paradigms -- Direct Visual Rule Learning, Deductive Rule Learning, and Componential Analysis -- designed to progressively enforce step-wise reasoning and disentangle the interplay between perception and reasoning. Our evaluation shows that advanced, closed-source VLMs (GPT-4o and Gemini 2.0) achieve near-superhuman performance, particularly when provided with high-quality image descriptions, while open-source models exhibit a significant performance bottleneck due to deficiencies in perception. An ablation study further confirms that perception, rather than reasoning, is the primary limiting factor, as open-source models apply extracted rules effectively when given accurate descriptions. These findings underscore the critical role of robust multimodal perception in enhancing generalizable visual reasoning and highlight the importance of structured, step-wise reasoning paradigms for advancing machine intelligence.

Image description datasets play a crucial role in the advancement of various applications such as image understanding, text-to-image generation, and text-image retrieval. Currently, image description datasets primarily originate from two sources. One source is the scraping of image-text pairs from the web. Despite their abundance, these descriptions are often of low quality and noisy. Another is through human labeling. Datasets such as COCO are generally very short and lack details. Although detailed image descriptions can be annotated by humans, the high annotation cost limits the feasibility. These limitations underscore the need for more efficient and scalable methods to generate accurate and detailed image descriptions. In this paper, we propose an innovative framework termed Image Textualization (IT), which automatically produces high-quality image descriptions by leveraging existing multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) and multiple vision expert models in a collaborative manner, which maximally convert the visual information into text. To address the current lack of benchmarks for detailed descriptions, we propose several benchmarks for comprehensive evaluation, which verifies the quality of image descriptions created by our framework. Furthermore, we show that LLaVA-7B, benefiting from training on IT-curated descriptions, acquire improved capability to generate richer image descriptions, substantially increasing the length and detail of their output with less hallucination.

People say, "A picture is worth a thousand words". Then how can we get the rich information out of the image? We argue that by using visual clues to bridge large pretrained vision foundation models and language models, we can do so without any extra cross-modal training. Thanks to the strong zero-shot capability of foundation models, we start by constructing a rich semantic representation of the image (e.g., image tags, object attributes / locations, captions) as a structured textual prompt, called visual clues, using a vision foundation model. Based on visual clues, we use large language model to produce a series of comprehensive descriptions for the visual content, which is then verified by the vision model again to select the candidate that aligns best with the image. We evaluate the quality of generated descriptions by quantitative and qualitative measurement. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of such a structured semantic representation.

Accessing 3D models remains challenging for Screen Reader (SR) users. While some existing 3D viewers allow creators to provide alternative text, they often lack sufficient detail about the 3D models. Grounded on a formative study, this paper introduces SweeperBot, a system that enables SR users to leverage visual question answering to explore and compare 3D models. SweeperBot answers SR users' visual questions by combining an optimal view selection technique with the strength of generative- and recognition-based foundation models. An expert review with 10 Blind and Low-Vision (BLV) users with SR experience demonstrated the feasibility of using SweeperBot to assist BLV users in exploring and comparing 3D models. The quality of the descriptions generated by SweeperBot was validated by a second survey study with 30 sighted participants.

The use of Deep Learning and Computer Vision in the Cultural Heritage domain is becoming highly relevant in the last few years with lots of applications about audio smart guides, interactive museums and augmented reality. All these technologies require lots of data to work effectively and be useful for the user. In the context of artworks, such data is annotated by experts in an expensive and time consuming process. In particular, for each artwork, an image of the artwork and a description sheet have to be collected in order to perform common tasks like Visual Question Answering. In this paper we propose a method for Visual Question Answering that allows to generate at runtime a description sheet that can be used for answering both visual and contextual questions about the artwork, avoiding completely the image and the annotation process. For this purpose, we investigate on the use of GPT-3 for generating descriptions for artworks analyzing the quality of generated descriptions through captioning metrics. Finally we evaluate the performance for Visual Question Answering and captioning tasks.

Contrastive vision-language models, such as CLIP, have demonstrated excellent zero-shot capability across semantic recognition tasks, mainly attributed to the training on a large-scale I&1T (one Image with one Text) dataset. This kind of multimodal representations often blend semantic and perceptual elements, placing a particular emphasis on semantics. However, this could be problematic for popular tasks like image quality assessment (IQA) and conditional image generation (CIG), which typically need to have fine control on perceptual and semantic features. Motivated by the above facts, this paper presents a new multimodal disentangled representation learning framework, which leverages disentangled text to guide image disentanglement. To this end, we first build an I&2T (one Image with a perceptual Text and a semantic Text) dataset, which consists of disentangled perceptual and semantic text descriptions for an image. Then, the disentangled text descriptions are utilized as supervisory signals to disentangle pure perceptual representations from CLIP's original `coarse' feature space, dubbed DeCLIP. Finally, the decoupled feature representations are used for both image quality assessment (technical quality and aesthetic quality) and conditional image generation. Extensive experiments and comparisons have demonstrated the advantages of the proposed method on the two popular tasks. The dataset, code, and model will be available.

Vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP have been cherished for their ability to perform zero-shot visual recognition on open-vocabulary concepts. This is achieved by selecting the object category whose textual representation bears the highest similarity with the query image. While successful in some domains, this method struggles with identifying fine-grained entities as well as generalizing to unseen concepts that are not captured by the training distribution. Recent works attempt to mitigate these challenges by integrating category descriptions at test time, albeit yielding modest improvements. We attribute these limited gains to a fundamental misalignment between image and description representations, which is rooted in the pretraining structure of CLIP. In this paper, we propose GRAIN, a new pretraining strategy aimed at aligning representations at both fine and coarse levels simultaneously. Our approach learns to jointly ground textual descriptions in image regions along with aligning overarching captions with global image representations. To drive this pre-training, we leverage frozen Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to derive large-scale synthetic annotations. We demonstrate the enhanced zero-shot performance of our model compared to current state-of-the art methods across 11 diverse image classification datasets. Additionally, we introduce Products-2023, a newly curated, manually labeled dataset featuring novel concepts, and showcase our model's ability to recognize these concepts by benchmarking on it. Significant improvements achieved by our model on other downstream tasks like retrieval further highlight the superior quality of representations learned by our approach. Code available at https://github.com/shaunak27/grain-clip .

Asking insightful questions is crucial for acquiring knowledge and expanding our understanding of the world. However, the importance of questioning has been largely overlooked in AI research, where models have been primarily developed to answer questions. With the recent advancements of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, we discover their capability to ask high-quality questions when provided with a suitable prompt. This discovery presents a new opportunity to develop an automatic questioning system. In this paper, we introduce ChatCaptioner, a novel automatic-questioning method deployed in image captioning. Here, ChatGPT is prompted to ask a series of informative questions about images to BLIP-2, a strong vision question-answering model. By keeping acquiring new visual information from BLIP-2's answers, ChatCaptioner is able to generate more enriched image descriptions. We conduct human-subject evaluations on common image caption datasets such as COCO, Conceptual Caption, and WikiArt, and compare ChatCaptioner with BLIP-2 as well as ground truth. Our results demonstrate that ChatCaptioner's captions are significantly more informative, receiving three times as many votes from human evaluators for providing the most image information. Besides, ChatCaptioner identifies 53% more objects within the image than BLIP-2 alone measured by WordNet synset matching. Code is available at https://github.com/Vision-CAIR/ChatCaptioner

Learning how to generate descriptions of images or videos received major interest both in the Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing communities. While a few works have proposed to learn a grounding during the generation process in an unsupervised way (via an attention mechanism), it remains unclear how good the quality of the grounding is and whether it benefits the description quality. In this work we propose a movie description model which learns to generate description and jointly ground (localize) the mentioned characters as well as do visual co-reference resolution between pairs of consecutive sentences/clips. We also propose to use weak localization supervision through character mentions provided in movie descriptions to learn the character grounding. At training time, we first learn how to localize characters by relating their visual appearance to mentions in the descriptions via a semi-supervised approach. We then provide this (noisy) supervision into our description model which greatly improves its performance. Our proposed description model improves over prior work w.r.t. generated description quality and additionally provides grounding and local co-reference resolution. We evaluate it on the MPII Movie Description dataset using automatic and human evaluation measures and using our newly collected grounding and co-reference data for characters.

3D scene generation is in high demand across various domains, including virtual reality, gaming, and the film industry. Owing to the powerful generative capabilities of text-to-image diffusion models that provide reliable priors, the creation of 3D scenes using only text prompts has become viable, thereby significantly advancing researches in text-driven 3D scene generation. In order to obtain multiple-view supervision from 2D diffusion models, prevailing methods typically employ the diffusion model to generate an initial local image, followed by iteratively outpainting the local image using diffusion models to gradually generate scenes. Nevertheless, these outpainting-based approaches prone to produce global inconsistent scene generation results without high degree of completeness, restricting their broader applications. To tackle these problems, we introduce HoloDreamer, a framework that first generates high-definition panorama as a holistic initialization of the full 3D scene, then leverage 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) to quickly reconstruct the 3D scene, thereby facilitating the creation of view-consistent and fully enclosed 3D scenes. Specifically, we propose Stylized Equirectangular Panorama Generation, a pipeline that combines multiple diffusion models to enable stylized and detailed equirectangular panorama generation from complex text prompts. Subsequently, Enhanced Two-Stage Panorama Reconstruction is introduced, conducting a two-stage optimization of 3D-GS to inpaint the missing region and enhance the integrity of the scene. Comprehensive experiments demonstrated that our method outperforms prior works in terms of overall visual consistency and harmony as well as reconstruction quality and rendering robustness when generating fully enclosed scenes.

Crafting magic and illusions is one of the most thrilling aspects of filmmaking, with visual effects (VFX) serving as the powerhouse behind unforgettable cinematic experiences. While recent advances in generative artificial intelligence have driven progress in generic image and video synthesis, the domain of controllable VFX generation remains relatively underexplored. In this work, we propose a novel paradigm for animated VFX generation as image animation, where dynamic effects are generated from user-friendly textual descriptions and static reference images. Our work makes two primary contributions: (i) Open-VFX, the first high-quality VFX video dataset spanning 15 diverse effect categories, annotated with textual descriptions, instance segmentation masks for spatial conditioning, and start-end timestamps for temporal control. (ii) VFX Creator, a simple yet effective controllable VFX generation framework based on a Video Diffusion Transformer. The model incorporates a spatial and temporal controllable LoRA adapter, requiring minimal training videos. Specifically, a plug-and-play mask control module enables instance-level spatial manipulation, while tokenized start-end motion timestamps embedded in the diffusion process, alongside the text encoder, allow precise temporal control over effect timing and pace. Extensive experiments on the Open-VFX test set demonstrate the superiority of the proposed system in generating realistic and dynamic effects, achieving state-of-the-art performance and generalization ability in both spatial and temporal controllability. Furthermore, we introduce a specialized metric to evaluate the precision of temporal control. By bridging traditional VFX techniques with generative approaches, VFX Creator unlocks new possibilities for efficient and high-quality video effect generation, making advanced VFX accessible to a broader audience.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models convert high-level language instructions into concrete, executable actions, a task that is especially challenging in open-world environments. We present Visual Foresight Planning (ForeAct), a general and efficient planner that guides a VLA step-by-step using imagined future observations and subtask descriptions. With an imagined future observation, the VLA can focus on visuo-motor inference rather than high-level semantic reasoning, leading to improved accuracy and generalization. Our planner comprises a highly efficient foresight image generation module that predicts a high-quality 640times480 future observation from the current visual input and language instruction within only 0.33s on an H100 GPU, together with a vision-language model that reasons over the task and produces subtask descriptions for both the generator and the VLA. Importantly, state-of-the-art VLAs can integrate our planner seamlessly by simply augmenting their visual inputs, without any architectural modification. The foresight generator is pretrained on over 1 million multi-task, cross-embodiment episodes, enabling it to learn robust embodied dynamics. We evaluate our framework on a benchmark that consists of 11 diverse, multi-step real-world tasks. It achieves an average success rate of 87.4%, demonstrating a +40.9% absolute improvement over the π_0 baseline (46.5%) and a +30.3% absolute improvement over π_0 augmented with textual subtask guidance (57.1%).

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated great potential in interpreting remote sensing (RS) images through language-guided semantic understanding. However, the effectiveness of these VLMs critically depends on high-quality image-text training data that captures rich semantic relationships between visual content and language descriptions. Unlike natural images, RS lacks large-scale interleaved image-text pairs from web data, making data collection challenging. While current approaches rely primarily on rule-based methods or flagship VLMs for data synthesis, a systematic framework for automated quality assessment of such synthetically generated RS visionlanguage data is notably absent. To fill this gap, we propose a novel score model trained on large-scale RS visionlanguage preference data for automated quality assessment. Our empirical results demonstrate that fine-tuning CLIP or advanced VLMs (e.g., Qwen2-VL) with the top 30% of data ranked by our score model achieves superior interpretation accuracy compared to both full-data fine-tuning and CLIP-score-based ranking approaches. Furthermore, we demonstrate applications of our scoring model for reinforcement learning (RL) training and best-of-N (BoN) testtime scaling, enabling significant improvements in VLM performance for RS tasks.

Face manipulation techniques have achieved significant advances, presenting serious challenges to security and social trust. Recent works demonstrate that leveraging multimodal models can enhance the generalization and interpretability of face forgery detection. However, existing annotation approaches, whether through human labeling or direct Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) generation, often suffer from hallucination issues, leading to inaccurate text descriptions, especially for high-quality forgeries. To address this, we propose Face Forgery Text Generator (FFTG), a novel annotation pipeline that generates accurate text descriptions by leveraging forgery masks for initial region and type identification, followed by a comprehensive prompting strategy to guide MLLMs in reducing hallucination. We validate our approach through fine-tuning both CLIP with a three-branch training framework combining unimodal and multimodal objectives, and MLLMs with our structured annotations. Experimental results demonstrate that our method not only achieves more accurate annotations with higher region identification accuracy, but also leads to improvements in model performance across various forgery detection benchmarks. Our Codes are available in https://github.com/skJack/VLFFD.git.

We introduce the novel Diffusion Visual Programmer (DVP), a neuro-symbolic image translation framework. Our proposed DVP seamlessly embeds a condition-flexible diffusion model within the GPT architecture, orchestrating a coherent sequence of visual programs (i.e., computer vision models) for various pro-symbolic steps, which span RoI identification, style transfer, and position manipulation, facilitating transparent and controllable image translation processes. Extensive experiments demonstrate DVP's remarkable performance, surpassing concurrent arts. This success can be attributed to several key features of DVP: First, DVP achieves condition-flexible translation via instance normalization, enabling the model to eliminate sensitivity caused by the manual guidance and optimally focus on textual descriptions for high-quality content generation. Second, the framework enhances in-context reasoning by deciphering intricate high-dimensional concepts in feature spaces into more accessible low-dimensional symbols (e.g., [Prompt], [RoI object]), allowing for localized, context-free editing while maintaining overall coherence. Last but not least, DVP improves systemic controllability and explainability by offering explicit symbolic representations at each programming stage, empowering users to intuitively interpret and modify results. Our research marks a substantial step towards harmonizing artificial image translation processes with cognitive intelligence, promising broader applications.

This paper proposes Omni Dense Captioning, a novel task designed to generate continuous, fine-grained, and structured audio-visual narratives with explicit timestamps. To ensure dense semantic coverage, we introduce a six-dimensional structural schema to create "script-like" captions, enabling readers to vividly imagine the video content scene by scene, akin to a cinematographic screenplay. To facilitate research, we construct OmniDCBench, a high-quality, human-annotated benchmark, and propose SodaM, a unified metric that evaluates time-aware detailed descriptions while mitigating scene boundary ambiguity. Furthermore, we construct a training dataset, TimeChatCap-42K, and present TimeChat-Captioner-7B, a strong baseline trained via SFT and GRPO with task-specific rewards. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TimeChat-Captioner-7B achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing Gemini-2.5-Pro, while its generated dense descriptions significantly boost downstream capabilities in audio-visual reasoning (DailyOmni and WorldSense) and temporal grounding (Charades-STA). All datasets, models, and code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/yaolinli/TimeChat-Captioner.

Massive multi-modality datasets play a significant role in facilitating the success of large video-language models. However, current video-language datasets primarily provide text descriptions for visual frames, considering audio to be weakly related information. They usually overlook exploring the potential of inherent audio-visual correlation, leading to monotonous annotation within each modality instead of comprehensive and precise descriptions. Such ignorance results in the difficulty of multiple cross-modality studies. To fulfill this gap, we present MMTrail, a large-scale multi-modality video-language dataset incorporating more than 20M trailer clips with visual captions, and 2M high-quality clips with multimodal captions. Trailers preview full-length video works and integrate context, visual frames, and background music. In particular, the trailer has two main advantages: (1) the topics are diverse, and the content characters are of various types, e.g., film, news, and gaming. (2) the corresponding background music is custom-designed, making it more coherent with the visual context. Upon these insights, we propose a systemic captioning framework, achieving various modality annotations with more than 27.1k hours of trailer videos. Here, to ensure the caption retains music perspective while preserving the authority of visual context, we leverage the advanced LLM to merge all annotations adaptively. In this fashion, our MMtrail dataset potentially paves the path for fine-grained large multimodal-language model training. In experiments, we provide evaluation metrics and benchmark results on our dataset, demonstrating the high quality of our annotation and its effectiveness for model training.

Figurative and non-literal expressions are profoundly integrated in human communication. Visualising such expressions allow us to convey our creative thoughts, and evoke nuanced emotions. Recent text-to-image models like Stable Diffusion, on the other hand, struggle to depict non-literal expressions. Recent works primarily deal with this issue by compiling humanly annotated datasets on a small scale, which not only demands specialised expertise but also proves highly inefficient. To address this issue, we introduce ViPE: Visualise Pretty-much Everything. ViPE offers a series of lightweight and robust language models that have been trained on a large-scale set of lyrics with noisy visual descriptions that represent their implicit meaning. The synthetic visual descriptions are generated by GPT3.5 relying on neither human annotations nor images. ViPE effectively expresses any arbitrary piece of text into a visualisable description, enabling meaningful and high-quality image generation. We provide compelling evidence that ViPE is more robust than GPT3.5 in synthesising visual elaborations. ViPE also exhibits an understanding of figurative expressions comparable to human experts, providing a powerful and open-source backbone to many downstream applications such as music video and caption generation.

Existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) increasingly emphasize complex understanding of various visual elements, including multiple objects, text information, and spatial relations. Their development for comprehensive visual perception hinges on the availability of high-quality image-text datasets that offer diverse visual elements and throughout image descriptions. However, the scarcity of such hyper-detailed datasets currently hinders progress within the MLLM community. The bottleneck stems from the limited perceptual capabilities of current caption engines, which fall short in providing complete and accurate annotations. To facilitate the cutting-edge research of MLLMs on comprehensive vision perception, we thereby propose Perceptual Fusion, using a low-budget but highly effective caption engine for complete and accurate image descriptions. Specifically, Perceptual Fusion integrates diverse perception experts as image priors to provide explicit information on visual elements and adopts an efficient MLLM as a centric pivot to mimic advanced MLLMs' perception abilities. We carefully select 1M highly representative images from uncurated LAION dataset and generate dense descriptions using our engine, dubbed DenseFusion-1M. Extensive experiments validate that our engine outperforms its counterparts, where the resulting dataset significantly improves the perception and cognition abilities of existing MLLMs across diverse vision-language benchmarks, especially with high-resolution images as inputs. The dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/baaivision/DenseFusion.

Person re-identification (ReID) has recently benefited from large pretrained vision-language models such as Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP). However, the absence of concrete descriptions necessitates the use of implicit text embeddings, which demand complicated and inefficient training strategies. To address this issue, we first propose one straightforward solution by leveraging existing image captioning models to generate pseudo captions for person images, and thereby boost person re-identification with large vision language models. Using models like the Large Language and Vision Assistant (LLAVA), we generate high-quality captions based on fixed templates that capture key semantic attributes such as gender, clothing, and age. By augmenting ReID training sets from uni-modality (image) to bi-modality (image and text), we introduce CLIP-SCGI, a simple yet effective framework that leverages synthesized captions to guide the learning of discriminative and robust representations. Built on CLIP, CLIP-SCGI fuses image and text embeddings through two modules to enhance the training process. To address quality issues in generated captions, we introduce a caption-guided inversion module that captures semantic attributes from images by converting relevant visual information into pseudo-word tokens based on the descriptions. This approach helps the model better capture key information and focus on relevant regions. The extracted features are then utilized in a cross-modal fusion module, guiding the model to focus on regions semantically consistent with the caption, thereby facilitating the optimization of the visual encoder to extract discriminative and robust representations. Extensive experiments on four popular ReID benchmarks demonstrate that CLIP-SCGI outperforms the state-of-the-art by a significant margin.

Text-to-image generation models have made significant progress in producing high-quality images from textual descriptions, yet they continue to struggle with maintaining subject consistency across multiple images, a fundamental requirement for visual storytelling. Existing methods attempt to address this by either fine-tuning models on large-scale story visualization datasets, which is resource-intensive, or by using training-free techniques that share information across generations, which still yield limited success. In this paper, we introduce a novel training-free sampling strategy called Zigzag Sampling with Asymmetric Prompts and Visual Sharing to enhance subject consistency in visual story generation. Our approach proposes a zigzag sampling mechanism that alternates between asymmetric prompting to retain subject characteristics, while a visual sharing module transfers visual cues across generated images to %further enforce consistency. Experimental results, based on both quantitative metrics and qualitative evaluations, demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms previous approaches in generating coherent and consistent visual stories. The code is available at https://github.com/Mingxiao-Li/Asymmetry-Zigzag-StoryDiffusion.

Recent state-of-the-art image restoration methods mostly adopt latent diffusion models with U-Net backbones, yet still facing challenges in achieving high-quality restoration due to their limited capabilities. Diffusion transformers (DiTs), like SD3, are emerging as a promising alternative because of their better quality with scalability. In this paper, we introduce DPIR (Dual Prompting Image Restoration), a novel image restoration method that effectivly extracts conditional information of low-quality images from multiple perspectives. Specifically, DPIR consits of two branches: a low-quality image conditioning branch and a dual prompting control branch. The first branch utilizes a lightweight module to incorporate image priors into the DiT with high efficiency. More importantly, we believe that in image restoration, textual description alone cannot fully capture its rich visual characteristics. Therefore, a dual prompting module is designed to provide DiT with additional visual cues, capturing both global context and local appearance. The extracted global-local visual prompts as extra conditional control, alongside textual prompts to form dual prompts, greatly enhance the quality of the restoration. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that DPIR delivers superior image restoration performance.

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) LMM-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 30% higher superior 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.

The rapid evolution of Multi-modality Large Language Models (MLLMs) has catalyzed a shift in computer vision from specialized models to general-purpose foundation models. Nevertheless, there is still an inadequacy in assessing the abilities of MLLMs on low-level visual perception and understanding. To address this gap, we present Q-Bench, a holistic benchmark crafted to systematically evaluate potential abilities of MLLMs on three realms: low-level visual perception, low-level visual description, and overall visual quality assessment. a) To evaluate the low-level perception ability, we construct the LLVisionQA dataset, consisting of 2,990 diverse-sourced images, each equipped with a human-asked question focusing on its low-level attributes. We then measure the correctness of MLLMs on answering these questions. b) To examine the description ability of MLLMs on low-level information, we propose the LLDescribe dataset consisting of long expert-labelled golden low-level text descriptions on 499 images, and a GPT-involved comparison pipeline between outputs of MLLMs and the golden descriptions. c) Besides these two tasks, we further measure their visual quality assessment ability to align with human opinion scores. Specifically, we design a softmax-based strategy that enables MLLMs to predict quantifiable quality scores, and evaluate them on various existing image quality assessment (IQA) datasets. Our evaluation across the three abilities confirms that MLLMs possess preliminary low-level visual skills. However, these skills are still unstable and relatively imprecise, indicating the need for specific enhancements on MLLMs towards these abilities. We hope that our benchmark can encourage the research community to delve deeper to discover and enhance these untapped potentials of MLLMs. Project Page: https://vqassessment.github.io/Q-Bench.

We introduce QuerYD, a new large-scale dataset for retrieval and event localisation in video. A unique feature of our dataset is the availability of two audio tracks for each video: the original audio, and a high-quality spoken description of the visual content. The dataset is based on YouDescribe, a volunteer project that assists visually-impaired people by attaching voiced narrations to existing YouTube videos. This ever-growing collection of videos contains highly detailed, temporally aligned audio and text annotations. The content descriptions are more relevant than dialogue, and more detailed than previous description attempts, which can be observed to contain many superficial or uninformative descriptions. To demonstrate the utility of the QuerYD dataset, we show that it can be used to train and benchmark strong models for retrieval and event localisation. Data, code and models are made publicly available, and we hope that QuerYD inspires further research on video understanding with written and spoken natural language.

Recently, there has been a surge in the popularity of pre trained large language models (LLMs) (such as GPT-4), sweeping across the entire Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV) communities. These LLMs have demonstrated advanced multi-modal understanding capabilities and showcased strong performance across various benchmarks. The LLM has started to embody traits of artificial general intelligence, which holds vital guidance for enhancing brain-like characteristics within visual encoding models. Hence, This paper proposes a new multi-modal training paradigm, aligning with LLM, for encoding fMRI activity in visual cortex. Based on this paradigm, we trained an encoding model in fMRI data named the LLM-Visual Encoding Model (LLM-VEM). Specifically, we utilize LLM (miniGPT4) to generate descriptive text for all stimulus images, forming a high-quality textual description set. Moreover, we use the pre-trained text encoder (CLIP) to process these detailed descriptions, obtaining the text embedding features. Next, we use the contrast loss function to minimize the distance between the image embedding features and the text embedding features to complete the alignment operation of the stimulus image and text information. With the assistance of the pre-trained LLM, this alignment process facilitates better learning of the visual encoding model, resulting in higher precision. The final experimental results indicate that our training paradigm has significantly aided in enhancing the performance of the visual encoding model.

The emergence of text-to-image synthesis (TIS) models has significantly influenced digital image creation by producing high-quality visuals from written descriptions. Yet these models heavily rely on the quality and specificity of textual prompts, posing a challenge for novice users who may not be familiar with TIS-model-preferred prompt writing. Existing solutions relieve this via automatic model-preferred prompt generation from user queries. However, this single-turn manner suffers from limited user-centricity in terms of result interpretability and user interactivity. To address these issues, we propose DialPrompt, a multi-turn dialogue-based TIS prompt generation model that emphasises user-centricity. DialPrompt is designed to follow a multi-turn guidance workflow, where in each round of dialogue the model queries user with their preferences on possible optimization dimensions before generating the final TIS prompt. To achieve this, we mined 15 essential dimensions for high-quality prompts from advanced users and curated a multi-turn dataset. Through training on this dataset, DialPrompt can improve interpretability by allowing users to understand the correlation between specific phrases and image attributes. Additionally, it enables greater user control and engagement in the prompt generation process, leading to more personalized and visually satisfying outputs. Experiments indicate that DialPrompt achieves a competitive result in the quality of synthesized images, outperforming existing prompt engineering approaches by 5.7%. Furthermore, in our user evaluation, DialPrompt outperforms existing approaches by 46.5% in user-centricity score and is rated 7.9/10 by 19 human reviewers.

User interface (UI) design is a difficult yet important task for ensuring the usability, accessibility, and aesthetic qualities of applications. In our paper, we develop a machine-learned model, UIClip, for assessing the design quality and visual relevance of a UI given its screenshot and natural language description. To train UIClip, we used a combination of automated crawling, synthetic augmentation, and human ratings to construct a large-scale dataset of UIs, collated by description and ranked by design quality. Through training on the dataset, UIClip implicitly learns properties of good and bad designs by i) assigning a numerical score that represents a UI design's relevance and quality and ii) providing design suggestions. In an evaluation that compared the outputs of UIClip and other baselines to UIs rated by 12 human designers, we found that UIClip achieved the highest agreement with ground-truth rankings. Finally, we present three example applications that demonstrate how UIClip can facilitate downstream applications that rely on instantaneous assessment of UI design quality: i) UI code generation, ii) UI design tips generation, and iii) quality-aware UI example search.

The objective of this paper is an automatic Audio Description (AD) model that ingests movies and outputs AD in text form. Generating high-quality movie AD is challenging due to the dependency of the descriptions on context, and the limited amount of training data available. In this work, we leverage the power of pretrained foundation models, such as GPT and CLIP, and only train a mapping network that bridges the two models for visually-conditioned text generation. In order to obtain high-quality AD, we make the following four contributions: (i) we incorporate context from the movie clip, AD from previous clips, as well as the subtitles; (ii) we address the lack of training data by pretraining on large-scale datasets, where visual or contextual information is unavailable, e.g. text-only AD without movies or visual captioning datasets without context; (iii) we improve on the currently available AD datasets, by removing label noise in the MAD dataset, and adding character naming information; and (iv) we obtain strong results on the movie AD task compared with previous methods.

The detection and localization of highly realistic deepfake audio-visual content are challenging even for the most advanced state-of-the-art methods. While most of the research efforts in this domain are focused on detecting high-quality deepfake images and videos, only a few works address the problem of the localization of small segments of audio-visual manipulations embedded in real videos. In this research, we emulate the process of such content generation and propose the AV-Deepfake1M dataset. The dataset contains content-driven (i) video manipulations, (ii) audio manipulations, and (iii) audio-visual manipulations for more than 2K subjects resulting in a total of more than 1M videos. The paper provides a thorough description of the proposed data generation pipeline accompanied by a rigorous analysis of the quality of the generated data. The comprehensive benchmark of the proposed dataset utilizing state-of-the-art deepfake detection and localization methods indicates a significant drop in performance compared to previous datasets. The proposed dataset will play a vital role in building the next-generation deepfake localization methods. The dataset and associated code are available at https://github.com/ControlNet/AV-Deepfake1M .

The development of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) enables the evaluation of image quality through natural language descriptions. This advancement allows for more detailed assessments. However, these MLLM-based IQA methods primarily rely on general contextual descriptions, sometimes limiting fine-grained quality assessment. To address this limitation, we introduce a new image quality assessment (IQA) task paradigm, grounding-IQA. This paradigm integrates multimodal referring and grounding with IQA to realize more fine-grained quality perception. Specifically, grounding-IQA comprises two subtasks: grounding-IQA-description (GIQA-DES) and visual question answering (GIQA-VQA). GIQA-DES involves detailed descriptions with precise locations (e.g., bounding boxes), while GIQA-VQA focuses on quality QA for local regions. To realize grounding-IQA, we construct a corresponding dataset, GIQA-160K, through our proposed automated annotation pipeline. Furthermore, we develop a well-designed benchmark, GIQA-Bench. The benchmark comprehensively evaluates the model grounding-IQA performance from three perspectives: description quality, VQA accuracy, and grounding precision. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed task paradigm, dataset, and benchmark facilitate the more fine-grained IQA application. Code: https://github.com/zhengchen1999/Grounding-IQA.

Language-based object detection (LOD) aims to align visual objects with language expressions. A large amount of paired data is utilized to improve LOD model generalizations. During the training process, recent studies leverage vision-language models (VLMs) to automatically generate human-like expressions for visual objects, facilitating training data scaling up. In this process, we observe that VLM hallucinations bring inaccurate object descriptions (e.g., object name, color, and shape) to deteriorate VL alignment quality. To reduce VLM hallucinations, we propose an agentic workflow controlled by an LLM to re-align language to visual objects via adaptively adjusting image and text prompts. We name this workflow Real-LOD, which includes planning, tool use, and reflection steps. Given an image with detected objects and VLM raw language expressions, Real-LOD reasons its state automatically and arranges action based on our neural symbolic designs (i.e., planning). The action will adaptively adjust the image and text prompts and send them to VLMs for object re-description (i.e., tool use). Then, we use another LLM to analyze these refined expressions for feedback (i.e., reflection). These steps are conducted in a cyclic form to gradually improve language descriptions for re-aligning to visual objects. We construct a dataset that contains a tiny amount of 0.18M images with re-aligned language expression and train a prevalent LOD model to surpass existing LOD methods by around 50% on the standard benchmarks. Our Real-LOD workflow, with automatic VL refinement, reveals a potential to preserve data quality along with scaling up data quantity, which further improves LOD performance from a data-alignment perspective.

Agent systems powered by large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on repository-level code-generation tasks. However, for tasks such as website codebase generation, which depend heavily on visual effects and user-interaction feedback, current code agents rely only on simple code execution for feedback and verification. This approach fails to capture the actual quality of the generated code. In this paper, we propose WebGen-Agent, a novel website-generation agent that leverages comprehensive and multi-level visual feedback to iteratively generate and refine the website codebase. Detailed and expressive text descriptions and suggestions regarding the screenshots and GUI-agent testing of the websites are generated by a visual language model (VLM), together with scores that quantify their quality. The screenshot and GUI-agent scores are further integrated with a backtracking and select-best mechanism, enhancing the performance of the agent. Utilizing the accurate visual scores inherent in the WebGen-Agent workflow, we further introduce Step-GRPO with Screenshot and GUI-agent Feedback to improve the ability of LLMs to act as the reasoning engine of WebGen-Agent. By using the screenshot and GUI-agent scores at each step as the reward in Step-GRPO, we provide a dense and reliable process supervision signal, which effectively improves the model's website-generation ability. On the WebGen-Bench dataset, WebGen-Agent increases the accuracy of Claude-3.5-Sonnet from 26.4% to 51.9% and its appearance score from 3.0 to 3.9, outperforming the previous state-of-the-art agent system. Additionally, our Step-GRPO training approach increases the accuracy of Qwen2.5-Coder-7B-Instruct from 38.9% to 45.4% and raises the appearance score from 3.4 to 3.7.

Agents operating in complex software environments benefit from reasoning about the consequences of their actions, as even a single incorrect user interface (UI) operation can derail long, artifact-preserving workflows. This challenge is particularly acute for computer-using scenarios, where real execution does not support counterfactual exploration, making large-scale trial-and-error learning and planning impractical despite the environment being fully digital and deterministic. We introduce the Computer-Using World Model (CUWM), a world model for desktop software that predicts the next UI state given the current state and a candidate action. CUWM adopts a two-stage factorization of UI dynamics: it first predicts a textual description of agent-relevant state changes, and then realizes these changes visually to synthesize the next screenshot. CUWM is trained on offline UI transitions collected from agents interacting with real Microsoft Office applications, and further refined with a lightweight reinforcement learning stage that aligns textual transition predictions with the structural requirements of computer-using environments. We evaluate CUWM via test-time action search, where a frozen agent uses the world model to simulate and compare candidate actions before execution. Across a range of Office tasks, world-model-guided test-time scaling improves decision quality and execution robustness.

While diffusion models show extraordinary talents in text-to-image generation, they may still fail to generate highly aesthetic images. More specifically, there is still a gap between the generated images and the real-world aesthetic images in finer-grained dimensions including color, lighting, composition, etc. In this paper, we propose Cross-Attention Value Mixing Control (VMix) Adapter, a plug-and-play aesthetics adapter, to upgrade the quality of generated images while maintaining generality across visual concepts by (1) disentangling the input text prompt into the content description and aesthetic description by the initialization of aesthetic embedding, and (2) integrating aesthetic conditions into the denoising process through value-mixed cross-attention, with the network connected by zero-initialized linear layers. Our key insight is to enhance the aesthetic presentation of existing diffusion models by designing a superior condition control method, all while preserving the image-text alignment. Through our meticulous design, VMix is flexible enough to be applied to community models for better visual performance without retraining. To validate the effectiveness of our method, we conducted extensive experiments, showing that VMix outperforms other state-of-the-art methods and is compatible with other community modules (e.g., LoRA, ControlNet, and IPAdapter) for image generation. The project page is https://vmix-diffusion.github.io/VMix/.

The proliferation of in-the-wild videos has greatly expanded the Video Quality Assessment (VQA) problem. Unlike early definitions that usually focus on limited distortion types, VQA on in-the-wild videos is especially challenging as it could be affected by complicated factors, including various distortions and diverse contents. Though subjective studies have collected overall quality scores for these videos, how the abstract quality scores relate with specific factors is still obscure, hindering VQA methods from more concrete quality evaluations (e.g. sharpness of a video). To solve this problem, we collect over two million opinions on 4,543 in-the-wild videos on 13 dimensions of quality-related factors, including in-capture authentic distortions (e.g. motion blur, noise, flicker), errors introduced by compression and transmission, and higher-level experiences on semantic contents and aesthetic issues (e.g. composition, camera trajectory), to establish the multi-dimensional Maxwell database. Specifically, we ask the subjects to label among a positive, a negative, and a neutral choice for each dimension. These explanation-level opinions allow us to measure the relationships between specific quality factors and abstract subjective quality ratings, and to benchmark different categories of VQA algorithms on each dimension, so as to more comprehensively analyze their strengths and weaknesses. Furthermore, we propose the MaxVQA, a language-prompted VQA approach that modifies vision-language foundation model CLIP to better capture important quality issues as observed in our analyses. The MaxVQA can jointly evaluate various specific quality factors and final quality scores with state-of-the-art accuracy on all dimensions, and superb generalization ability on existing datasets. Code and data available at https://github.com/VQAssessment/MaxVQA.

Despite the longstanding adage "an image is worth a thousand words," creating accurate and hyper-detailed image descriptions for training Vision-Language models remains challenging. Current datasets typically have web-scraped descriptions that are short, low-granularity, and often contain details unrelated to the visual content. As a result, models trained on such data generate descriptions replete with missing information, visual inconsistencies, and hallucinations. To address these issues, we introduce ImageInWords (IIW), a carefully designed human-in-the-loop annotation framework for curating hyper-detailed image descriptions and a new dataset resulting from this process. We validate the framework through evaluations focused on the quality of the dataset and its utility for fine-tuning with considerations for readability, comprehensiveness, specificity, hallucinations, and human-likeness. Our dataset significantly improves across these dimensions compared to recently released datasets (+66%) and GPT-4V outputs (+48%). Furthermore, models fine-tuned with IIW data excel by +31% against prior work along the same human evaluation dimensions. Given our fine-tuned models, we also evaluate text-to-image generation and vision-language reasoning. Our model's descriptions can generate images closest to the original, as judged by both automated and human metrics. We also find our model produces more compositionally rich descriptions, outperforming the best baseline by up to 6% on ARO, SVO-Probes, and Winoground datasets.

The prevalence of user-generated content (UGC) on platforms such as YouTube and TikTok has rendered no-reference (NR) perceptual video quality assessment (VQA) vital for optimizing video delivery. Nonetheless, the characteristics of non-professional acquisition and the subsequent transcoding of UGC video on sharing platforms present significant challenges for NR-VQA. Although NR-VQA models attempt to infer mean opinion scores (MOS), their modeling of subjective scores for compressed content remains limited due to the absence of fine-grained perceptual annotations of artifact types. To address these challenges, we propose CAMP-VQA, a novel NR-VQA framework that exploits the semantic understanding capabilities of large vision-language models. Our approach introduces a quality-aware prompting mechanism that integrates video metadata (e.g., resolution, frame rate, bitrate) with key fragments extracted from inter-frame variations to guide the BLIP-2 pretraining approach in generating fine-grained quality captions. A unified architecture has been designed to model perceptual quality across three dimensions: semantic alignment, temporal characteristics, and spatial characteristics. These multimodal features are extracted and fused, then regressed to video quality scores. Extensive experiments on a wide variety of UGC datasets demonstrate that our model consistently outperforms existing NR-VQA methods, achieving improved accuracy without the need for costly manual fine-grained annotations. Our method achieves the best performance in terms of average rank and linear correlation (SRCC: 0.928, PLCC: 0.938) compared to state-of-the-art methods. The source code and trained models, along with a user-friendly demo, are available at: https://github.com/xinyiW915/CAMP-VQA.

Descriptive video service (DVS) provides linguistic descriptions of movies and allows visually impaired people to follow a movie along with their peers. Such descriptions are by design mainly visual and thus naturally form an interesting data source for computer vision and computational linguistics. In this work we propose a novel dataset which contains transcribed DVS, which is temporally aligned to full length HD movies. In addition we also collected the aligned movie scripts which have been used in prior work and compare the two different sources of descriptions. In total the Movie Description dataset contains a parallel corpus of over 54,000 sentences and video snippets from 72 HD movies. We characterize the dataset by benchmarking different approaches for generating video descriptions. Comparing DVS to scripts, we find that DVS is far more visual and describes precisely what is shown rather than what should happen according to the scripts created prior to movie production.

Measuring the perception of visual content is a long-standing problem in computer vision. Many mathematical models have been developed to evaluate the look or quality of an image. Despite the effectiveness of such tools in quantifying degradations such as noise and blurriness levels, such quantification is loosely coupled with human language. When it comes to more abstract perception about the feel of visual content, existing methods can only rely on supervised models that are explicitly trained with labeled data collected via laborious user study. In this paper, we go beyond the conventional paradigms by exploring the rich visual language prior encapsulated in Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) models for assessing both the quality perception (look) and abstract perception (feel) of images in a zero-shot manner. In particular, we discuss effective prompt designs and show an effective prompt pairing strategy to harness the prior. We also provide extensive experiments on controlled datasets and Image Quality Assessment (IQA) benchmarks. Our results show that CLIP captures meaningful priors that generalize well to different perceptual assessments. Code is avaliable at https://github.com/IceClear/CLIP-IQA.

Audio Description (AD) provides linguistic descriptions of movies and allows visually impaired people to follow a movie along with their peers. Such descriptions are by design mainly visual and thus naturally form an interesting data source for computer vision and computational linguistics. In this work we propose a novel dataset which contains transcribed ADs, which are temporally aligned to full length movies. In addition we also collected and aligned movie scripts used in prior work and compare the two sources of descriptions. In total the Large Scale Movie Description Challenge (LSMDC) contains a parallel corpus of 118,114 sentences and video clips from 202 movies. First we characterize the dataset by benchmarking different approaches for generating video descriptions. Comparing ADs to scripts, we find that ADs are indeed more visual and describe precisely what is shown rather than what should happen according to the scripts created prior to movie production. Furthermore, we present and compare the results of several teams who participated in a challenge organized in the context of the workshop "Describing and Understanding Video & The Large Scale Movie Description Challenge (LSMDC)", at ICCV 2015.

Generating and editing images from open domain text prompts is a challenging task that heretofore has required expensive and specially trained models. We demonstrate a novel methodology for both tasks which is capable of producing images of high visual quality from text prompts of significant semantic complexity without any training by using a multimodal encoder to guide image generations. We demonstrate on a variety of tasks how using CLIP [37] to guide VQGAN [11] produces higher visual quality outputs than prior, less flexible approaches like DALL-E [38], GLIDE [33] and Open-Edit [24], despite not being trained for the tasks presented. Our code is available in a public repository.

Video Quality Assessment (VQA), which intends to predict the perceptual quality of videos, has attracted increasing attention. Due to factors like motion blur or specific distortions, the quality of different regions in a video varies. Recognizing the region-wise local quality within a video is beneficial for assessing global quality and can guide us in adopting fine-grained enhancement or transcoding strategies. Due to the heavy cost of annotating region-wise quality, the lack of ground truth constraints from relevant datasets further complicates the utilization of local perception. Inspired by the Human Visual System (HVS) that links global quality to the local texture of different regions and their visual saliency, we propose a Kaleidoscope Video Quality Assessment (KVQ) framework, which aims to effectively assess both saliency and local texture, thereby facilitating the assessment of global quality. Our framework extracts visual saliency and allocates attention using Fusion-Window Attention (FWA) while incorporating a Local Perception Constraint (LPC) to mitigate the reliance of regional texture perception on neighboring areas. KVQ obtains significant improvements across multiple scenarios on five VQA benchmarks compared to SOTA methods. Furthermore, to assess local perception, we establish a new Local Perception Visual Quality (LPVQ) dataset with region-wise annotations. Experimental results demonstrate the capability of KVQ in perceiving local distortions. KVQ models and the LPVQ dataset will be available at https://github.com/qyp2000/KVQ.

Video descriptions are crucial for blind and low vision (BLV) users to access visual content. However, current artificial intelligence models for generating descriptions often fall short due to limitations in the quality of human annotations within training datasets, resulting in descriptions that do not fully meet BLV users' needs. To address this gap, we introduce VideoA11y, an approach that leverages multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and video accessibility guidelines to generate descriptions tailored for BLV individuals. Using this method, we have curated VideoA11y-40K, the largest and most comprehensive dataset of 40,000 videos described for BLV users. Rigorous experiments across 15 video categories, involving 347 sighted participants, 40 BLV participants, and seven professional describers, showed that VideoA11y descriptions outperform novice human annotations and are comparable to trained human annotations in clarity, accuracy, objectivity, descriptiveness, and user satisfaction. We evaluated models on VideoA11y-40K using both standard and custom metrics, demonstrating that MLLMs fine-tuned on this dataset produce high-quality accessible descriptions. Code and dataset are available at https://people-robots.github.io/VideoA11y.

We explore a new task for audio-visual-language modeling called fine-grained audible video description (FAVD). It aims to provide detailed textual descriptions for the given audible videos, including the appearance and spatial locations of each object, the actions of moving objects, and the sounds in videos. Existing visual-language modeling tasks often concentrate on visual cues in videos while undervaluing the language and audio modalities. On the other hand, FAVD requires not only audio-visual-language modeling skills but also paragraph-level language generation abilities. We construct the first fine-grained audible video description benchmark (FAVDBench) to facilitate this research. For each video clip, we first provide a one-sentence summary of the video, ie, the caption, followed by 4-6 sentences describing the visual details and 1-2 audio-related descriptions at the end. The descriptions are provided in both English and Chinese. We create two new metrics for this task: an EntityScore to gauge the completeness of entities in the visual descriptions, and an AudioScore to assess the audio descriptions. As a preliminary approach to this task, we propose an audio-visual-language transformer that extends existing video captioning model with an additional audio branch. We combine the masked language modeling and auto-regressive language modeling losses to optimize our model so that it can produce paragraph-level descriptions. We illustrate the efficiency of our model in audio-visual-language modeling by evaluating it against the proposed benchmark using both conventional captioning metrics and our proposed metrics. We further put our benchmark to the test in video generation models, demonstrating that employing fine-grained video descriptions can create more intricate videos than using captions.

Image captioning models tend to describe images in an object-centric way, emphasising visible objects. But image descriptions can also abstract away from objects and describe the type of scene depicted. In this paper, we explore the potential of a state-of-the-art Vision and Language model, VinVL, to caption images at the scene level using (1) a novel dataset which pairs images with both object-centric and scene descriptions. Through (2) an in-depth analysis of the effect of the fine-tuning, we show (3) that a small amount of curated data suffices to generate scene descriptions without losing the capability to identify object-level concepts in the scene; the model acquires a more holistic view of the image compared to when object-centric descriptions are generated. We discuss the parallels between these results and insights from computational and cognitive science research on scene perception.

Automatic video summarization is still an unsolved problem due to several challenges. The currently available datasets either have very short videos or have few long videos of only a particular type. We introduce a new benchmarking video dataset called VISIOCITY (VIdeo SummarIzatiOn based on Continuity, Intent and DiversiTY) which comprises of longer videos across six different categories with dense concept annotations capable of supporting different flavors of video summarization and other vision problems. For long videos, human reference summaries necessary for supervised video summarization techniques are difficult to obtain. We explore strategies to automatically generate multiple reference summaries from indirect ground truth present in VISIOCITY. We show that these summaries are at par with human summaries. We also present a study of different desired characteristics of a good summary and demonstrate how it is normal to have two good summaries with different characteristics. Thus we argue that evaluating a summary against one or more human summaries and using a single measure has its shortcomings. We propose an evaluation framework for better quantitative assessment of summary quality which is closer to human judgment. Lastly, we present insights into how a model can be enhanced to yield better summaries. Sepcifically, when multiple diverse ground truth summaries can exist, learning from them individually and using a combination of loss functions measuring different characteristics is better than learning from a single combined (oracle) ground truth summary using a single loss function. We demonstrate the effectiveness of doing so as compared to some of the representative state of the art techniques tested on VISIOCITY. We release VISIOCITY as a benchmarking dataset and invite researchers to test the effectiveness of their video summarization algorithms on VISIOCITY.

We propose a simple yet effective image captioning framework that can determine the quality of an image and notify the user of the reasons for any flaws in the image. Our framework first determines the quality of images and then generates captions using only those images that are determined to be of high quality. The user is notified by the flaws feature to retake if image quality is low, and this cycle is repeated until the input image is deemed to be of high quality. As a component of the framework, we trained and evaluated a low-quality image detection model that simultaneously learns difficulty in recognizing images and individual flaws, and we demonstrated that our proposal can explain the reasons for flaws with a sufficient score. We also evaluated a dataset with low-quality images removed by our framework and found improved values for all four common metrics (e.g., BLEU-4, METEOR, ROUGE-L, CIDEr), confirming an improvement in general-purpose image captioning capability. Our framework would assist the visually impaired, who have difficulty judging image quality.

Visual text evokes an image in a person's mind, while non-visual text fails to do so. A method to automatically detect visualness in text will unlock the ability to augment text with relevant images, as neural text-to-image generation and retrieval models operate on the implicit assumption that the input text is visual in nature. We curate a dataset of 3,620 English sentences and their visualness scores provided by multiple human annotators. Additionally, we use documents that contain text and visual assets to create a distantly supervised corpus of document text and associated images. We also propose a fine-tuning strategy that adapts large vision-language models like CLIP that assume a one-to-one correspondence between text and image to the task of scoring text visualness from text input alone. Our strategy involves modifying the model's contrastive learning objective to map text identified as non-visual to a common NULL image while matching visual text to their corresponding images in the document. We evaluate the proposed approach on its ability to (i) classify visual and non-visual text accurately, and (ii) attend over words that are identified as visual in psycholinguistic studies. Empirical evaluation indicates that our approach performs better than several heuristics and baseline models for the proposed task. Furthermore, to highlight the importance of modeling the visualness of text, we conduct qualitative analyses of text-to-image generation systems like DALL-E.

This paper introduces a new data-driven, non-parametric method for image quality and aesthetics assessment, surpassing existing approaches and requiring no prompt engineering or fine-tuning. We eliminate the need for expressive textual embeddings by proposing efficient image anchors in the data. Through extensive evaluations of 7 state-of-the-art self-supervised models, our method demonstrates superior performance and robustness across various datasets and benchmarks. Notably, it achieves high agreement with human assessments even with limited data and shows high robustness to the nature of data and their pre-processing pipeline. Our contributions offer a streamlined solution for assessment of images while providing insights into the perception of visual information.

Video quality assessment (VQA) aims to objectively quantify perceptual quality degradation in alignment with human visual perception. Despite recent advances, existing VQA models still suffer from two critical limitations: poor generalization to out-of-distribution (OOD) videos and limited explainability, which restrict their applicability in real-world scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose VQAThinker, a reasoning-based VQA framework that leverages large multimodal models (LMMs) with reinforcement learning to jointly model video quality understanding and scoring, emulating human perceptual decision-making. Specifically, we adopt group relative policy optimization (GRPO), a rule-guided reinforcement learning algorithm that enables reasoning over video quality under score-level supervision, and introduce three VQA-specific rewards: (1) a bell-shaped regression reward that increases rapidly as the prediction error decreases and becomes progressively less sensitive near the ground truth; (2) a pairwise ranking reward that guides the model to correctly determine the relative quality between video pairs; and (3) a temporal consistency reward that encourages the model to prefer temporally coherent videos over their perturbed counterparts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VQAThinker achieves state-of-the-art performance on both in-domain and OOD VQA benchmarks, showing strong generalization for video quality scoring. Furthermore, evaluations on video quality understanding tasks validate its superiority in distortion attribution and quality description compared to existing explainable VQA models and LMMs. These findings demonstrate that reinforcement learning offers an effective pathway toward building generalizable and explainable VQA models solely with score-level supervision.

This paper proposes an explicit way to optimize the super-resolution network for generating visually pleasing images. The previous approaches use several loss functions which is hard to interpret and has the implicit relationships to improve the perceptual score. We show how to exploit the machine learning based model which is directly trained to provide the perceptual score on generated images. It is believed that these models can be used to optimizes the super-resolution network which is easier to interpret. We further analyze the characteristic of the existing loss and our proposed explicit perceptual loss for better interpretation. The experimental results show the explicit approach has a higher perceptual score than other approaches. Finally, we demonstrate the relation of explicit perceptual loss and visually pleasing images using subjective evaluation.

Recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel on benchmark vision-language tasks, yet little is known about how input visual quality shapes their responses. Does higher perceptual quality of images already translate to better MLLM understanding? We conduct the first systematic study spanning leading MLLMs and a suite of vision-language benchmarks, applying controlled degradations and stylistic shifts to each image. Surprisingly, we uncover a visual-quality paradox: model, task, and even individual-instance performance can improve when images deviate from human-perceived fidelity. Off-the-shelf restoration pipelines fail to reconcile these idiosyncratic preferences. To close the gap, we introduce Visual-Quality Test-Time Tuning (VQ-TTT)-a lightweight adaptation module that: (1) inserts a learnable, low-rank kernel before the frozen vision encoder to modulate frequency content; and (2) fine-tunes only shallow vision-encoder layers via LoRA. VQ-TTT dynamically adjusts each input image in a single forward pass, aligning it with task-specific model preferences. Across the evaluated MLLMs and all datasets, VQ-TTT lifts significant average accuracy, with no external models, cached features, or extra training data. These findings redefine ``better'' visual inputs for MLLMs and highlight the need for adaptive, rather than universally ``clean'', imagery, in the new era of AI being the main data customer.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) are gaining traction for their remarkable ability to process and integrate visual and textual data. Despite their popularity, the capacity of LVLMs to generate precise, fine-grained textual descriptions has not been fully explored. This study addresses this gap by focusing on distinctiveness and fidelity, assessing how models like Open-Flamingo, IDEFICS, and MiniGPT-4 can distinguish between similar objects and accurately describe visual features. We proposed the Textual Retrieval-Augmented Classification (TRAC) framework, which, by leveraging its generative capabilities, allows us to delve deeper into analyzing fine-grained visual description generation. This research provides valuable insights into the generation quality of LVLMs, enhancing the understanding of multimodal language models. Notably, MiniGPT-4 stands out for its better ability to generate fine-grained descriptions, outperforming the other two models in this aspect. The code is provided at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Explore_FGVDs-E277.

The advent and proliferation of large multi-modal models (LMMs) have introduced new paradigms to computer vision, transforming various tasks into a unified visual question answering framework. Video Quality Assessment (VQA), a classic field in low-level visual perception, focused initially on quantitative video quality scoring. However, driven by advances in LMMs, it is now progressing toward more holistic visual quality understanding tasks. Recent studies in the image domain have demonstrated that Visual Question Answering (VQA) can markedly enhance low-level visual quality evaluation. Nevertheless, related work has not been explored in the video domain, leaving substantial room for improvement. To address this gap, we introduce the VQA2 Instruction Dataset - the first visual question answering instruction dataset that focuses on video quality assessment. This dataset consists of 3 subsets and covers various video types, containing 157,755 instruction question-answer pairs. Then, leveraging this foundation, we present the VQA2 series models. The VQA2 series models interleave visual and motion tokens to enhance the perception of spatial-temporal quality details in videos. We conduct extensive experiments on video quality scoring and understanding tasks, and results demonstrate that the VQA2series models achieve excellent performance in both tasks. Notably, our final model, the VQA2-Assistant, exceeds the renowned GPT-4o in visual quality understanding tasks while maintaining strong competitiveness in quality scoring tasks. Our work provides a foundation and feasible approach for integrating low-level video quality assessment and understanding with LMMs.

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have experienced significant advancement in visual understanding and reasoning, their potential to serve as powerful, flexible, interpretable, and text-driven models for Image Quality Assessment (IQA) remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive and systematic study of prompting MLLMs for IQA. We first investigate nine prompting systems for MLLMs as the combinations of three standardized testing procedures in psychophysics (i.e., the single-stimulus, double-stimulus, and multiple-stimulus methods) and three popular prompting strategies in natural language processing (i.e., the standard, in-context, and chain-of-thought prompting). We then present a difficult sample selection procedure, taking into account sample diversity and uncertainty, to further challenge MLLMs equipped with the respective optimal prompting systems. We assess three open-source and one closed-source MLLMs on several visual attributes of image quality (e.g., structural and textural distortions, geometric transformations, and color differences) in both full-reference and no-reference scenarios. Experimental results show that only the closed-source GPT-4V provides a reasonable account for human perception of image quality, but is weak at discriminating fine-grained quality variations (e.g., color differences) and at comparing visual quality of multiple images, tasks humans can perform effortlessly.

In this paper, we propose a novel parameter-efficient adaptation method for No- Reference Image Quality Assessment (NR-IQA) using visual prompts optimized in pixel-space. Unlike full fine-tuning of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), our approach trains only 600K parameters at most (< 0.01% of the base model), while keeping the underlying model fully frozen. During inference, these visual prompts are combined with images via addition and processed by mPLUG-Owl2 with the textual query "Rate the technical quality of the image." Evaluations across distortion types (synthetic, realistic, AI-generated) on KADID- 10k, KonIQ-10k, and AGIQA-3k demonstrate competitive performance against full finetuned methods and specialized NR-IQA models, achieving 0.93 SRCC on KADID-10k. To our knowledge, this is the first work to leverage pixel-space visual prompts for NR-IQA, enabling efficient MLLM adaptation for low-level vision tasks. The source code is publicly available at https: // github. com/ yahya-ben/ mplug2-vp-for-nriqa .

While vision-language models (VLMs) have advanced into detailed image description, evaluation remains a challenge. Standard metrics (e.g. CIDEr, SPICE) were designed for short texts and tuned to recognize errors that are now uncommon, such as object misidentification. In contrast, long texts require sensitivity to attribute and relation attachments and scores that localize errors to particular text spans. In this work, we introduce PoSh, a metric for detailed image description that uses scene graphs as structured rubrics to guide LLMs-as-a-Judge, producing aggregate scores grounded in fine-grained errors (e.g. mistakes in compositional understanding). PoSh is replicable, interpretable and a better proxy for human raters than existing metrics (including GPT4o-as-a-Judge). To validate PoSh, we introduce a challenging new dataset, DOCENT. This novel benchmark contains artwork, paired with expert-written references, and model-generated descriptions, augmented with granular and coarse judgments of their quality from art history students. Thus, DOCENT enables evaluating both detailed image description metrics and detailed image description itself in a challenging new domain. We show that PoSh achieves stronger correlations (+0.05 Spearman rho) with the human judgments in DOCENT than the best open-weight alternatives, is robust to image type (using CapArena, an existing dataset of web imagery) and is a capable reward function, outperforming standard supervised fine-tuning. Then, using PoSh, we characterize the performance of open and closed models in describing the paintings, sketches and statues in DOCENT and find that foundation models struggle to achieve full, error-free coverage of images with rich scene dynamics, establishing a demanding new task to gauge VLM progress. Through both PoSh and DOCENT, we hope to enable advances in important areas such as assistive text generation.

With the rapid advancement of Vision Language Models (VLMs), VLM-based Image Quality Assessment (IQA) seeks to describe image quality linguistically to align with human expression and capture the multifaceted nature of IQA tasks. However, current methods are still far from practical usage. First, prior works focus narrowly on specific sub-tasks or settings, which do not align with diverse real-world applications. Second, their performance is sub-optimal due to limitations in dataset coverage, scale, and quality. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Depicted image Quality Assessment in the Wild (DepictQA-Wild). Our method includes a multi-functional IQA task paradigm that encompasses both assessment and comparison tasks, brief and detailed responses, full-reference and non-reference scenarios. We introduce a ground-truth-informed dataset construction approach to enhance data quality, and scale up the dataset to 495K under the brief-detail joint framework. Consequently, we construct a comprehensive, large-scale, and high-quality dataset, named DQ-495K. We also retain image resolution during training to better handle resolution-related quality issues, and estimate a confidence score that is helpful to filter out low-quality responses. Experimental results demonstrate that DepictQA-Wild significantly outperforms traditional score-based methods, prior VLM-based IQA models, and proprietary GPT-4V in distortion identification, instant rating, and reasoning tasks. Our advantages are further confirmed by real-world applications including assessing the web-downloaded images and ranking model-processed images. Datasets and codes will be released in https://depictqa.github.io/depictqa-wild/.

Despite significant advancements in vision-language models (VLMs), there lacks effective approaches to enhance response quality by scaling inference-time computation. This capability is known to be a core step towards the self-improving models in recent large language model studies. In this paper, we present Vision Value Model (VisVM) that can guide VLM inference-time search to generate responses with better visual comprehension. Specifically, VisVM not only evaluates the generated sentence quality in the current search step, but also anticipates the quality of subsequent sentences that may result from the current step, thus providing a long-term value. In this way, VisVM steers VLMs away from generating sentences prone to hallucinations or insufficient detail, thereby producing higher quality responses. Experimental results demonstrate that VisVM-guided search significantly enhances VLMs' ability to generate descriptive captions with richer visual details and fewer hallucinations, compared with greedy decoding and search methods with other visual reward signals. Furthermore, we find that self-training the model with the VisVM-guided captions improve VLM's performance across a wide range of multimodal benchmarks, indicating the potential for developing self-improving VLMs. Our value model and code are available at https://github.com/si0wang/VisVM.

Often, the needs and visual abilities differ between the annotator group and the end user group. Generating detailed diagram descriptions for blind and low-vision (BLV) users is one such challenging domain. Sighted annotators could describe visuals with ease, but existing studies have shown that direct generations by them are costly, bias-prone, and somewhat lacking by BLV standards. In this study, we ask sighted individuals to assess -- rather than produce -- diagram descriptions generated by vision-language models (VLM) that have been guided with latent supervision via a multi-pass inference. The sighted assessments prove effective and useful to professional educators who are themselves BLV and teach visually impaired learners. We release Sightation, a collection of diagram description datasets spanning 5k diagrams and 137k samples for completion, preference, retrieval, question answering, and reasoning training purposes and demonstrate their fine-tuning potential in various downstream tasks.

With the rapid advancement of video generation models such as Sora, video quality assessment (VQA) is becoming increasingly crucial for selecting high-quality videos from large-scale datasets used in pre-training. Traditional VQA methods, typically producing single numerical scores, often lack comprehensiveness and interpretability. To address these challenges, we introduce MVQA-68K, a novel multi-dimensional VQA dataset comprising over 68,000 carefully annotated videos, covering seven essential quality dimensions: overall aesthetics, camera movement, dynamic degree, texture detail, composition, visual quality, and factual consistency. Each annotation includes detailed chain-of-thought reasoning to facilitate interpretability and comprehensive understanding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MVQA-68K significantly enhances the performance of various multimodal large language models (MLLMs) on the VQA task, achieving state-of-the-art results not only on our internal test set (Fig.1) but also on public benchmarks including LSVQ-test, LSVQ-1080p, and LIVE-VQC. Meantime, incorporating explicit reasoning process during VQA training substantially boosts the zero-shot generalization. Code and dataset will be available at github: https://github.com/Controller01-ai/MVQA-68K

Evaluating the quality of automatically generated image descriptions is challenging, requiring metrics that capture various aspects such as grammaticality, coverage, correctness, and truthfulness. While human evaluation offers valuable insights, its cost and time-consuming nature pose limitations. Existing automated metrics like BLEU, ROUGE, METEOR, and CIDEr aim to bridge this gap but often show weak correlations with human judgment. We address this challenge by introducing a novel evaluation framework rooted in a modern large language model (LLM), such as GPT-4 or Gemini, capable of image generation. In our proposed framework, we begin by feeding an input image into a designated image captioning model, chosen for evaluation, to generate a textual description. Using this description, an LLM then creates a new image. By extracting features from both the original and LLM-created images, we measure their similarity using a designated similarity metric. A high similarity score suggests that the image captioning model has accurately generated textual descriptions, while a low similarity score indicates discrepancies, revealing potential shortcomings in the model's performance. Human-annotated reference captions are not required in our proposed evaluation framework, which serves as a valuable tool for evaluating the effectiveness of image captioning models. Its efficacy is confirmed through human evaluation.

We introduce a Depicted image Quality Assessment method (DepictQA), overcoming the constraints of traditional score-based approaches. DepictQA leverages Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), allowing for detailed, language-based, human-like evaluation of image quality. Unlike conventional Image Quality Assessment (IQA) methods relying on scores, DepictQA interprets image content and distortions descriptively and comparatively, aligning closely with humans' reasoning process. To build the DepictQA model, we establish a hierarchical task framework, and collect a multi-modal IQA training dataset, named M-BAPPS. To navigate the challenges in limited training data and processing multiple images, we propose to use multi-source training data and specialized image tags. Our DepictQA demonstrates a better performance than score-based methods on the BAPPS benchmark. Moreover, compared with general MLLMs, our DepictQA can generate more accurate reasoning descriptive languages. Our research indicates that language-based IQA methods have the potential to be customized for individual preferences. Datasets and codes will be released publicly.

The explosive growth of videos on streaming media platforms has underscored the urgent need for effective video quality assessment (VQA) algorithms to monitor and perceptually optimize the quality of streaming videos. However, VQA remains an extremely challenging task due to the diverse video content and the complex spatial and temporal distortions, thus necessitating more advanced methods to address these issues. Nowadays, large multimodal models (LMMs), such as GPT-4V, have exhibited strong capabilities for various visual understanding tasks, motivating us to leverage the powerful multimodal representation ability of LMMs to solve the VQA task. Therefore, we propose the first Large Multi-Modal Video Quality Assessment (LMM-VQA) model, which introduces a novel spatiotemporal visual modeling strategy for quality-aware feature extraction. Specifically, we first reformulate the quality regression problem into a question and answering (Q&A) task and construct Q&A prompts for VQA instruction tuning. Then, we design a spatiotemporal vision encoder to extract spatial and temporal features to represent the quality characteristics of videos, which are subsequently mapped into the language space by the spatiotemporal projector for modality alignment. Finally, the aligned visual tokens and the quality-inquired text tokens are aggregated as inputs for the large language model (LLM) to generate the quality score and level. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LMM-VQA achieves state-of-the-art performance across five VQA benchmarks, exhibiting an average improvement of 5% in generalization ability over existing methods. Furthermore, due to the advanced design of the spatiotemporal encoder and projector, LMM-VQA also performs exceptionally well on general video understanding tasks, further validating its effectiveness. Our code will be released at https://github.com/Sueqk/LMM-VQA.

In this paper we present VideoSET, a method for Video Summary Evaluation through Text that can evaluate how well a video summary is able to retain the semantic information contained in its original video. We observe that semantics is most easily expressed in words, and develop a text-based approach for the evaluation. Given a video summary, a text representation of the video summary is first generated, and an NLP-based metric is then used to measure its semantic distance to ground-truth text summaries written by humans. We show that our technique has higher agreement with human judgment than pixel-based distance metrics. We also release text annotations and ground-truth text summaries for a number of publicly available video datasets, for use by the computer vision community.

Image-to-text tasks, such as open-ended image captioning and controllable image description, have received extensive attention for decades. Here, we further advance this line of work by presenting Visual Spatial Description (VSD), a new perspective for image-to-text toward spatial semantics. Given an image and two objects inside it, VSD aims to produce one description focusing on the spatial perspective between the two objects. Accordingly, we manually annotate a dataset to facilitate the investigation of the newly-introduced task and build several benchmark encoder-decoder models by using VL-BART and VL-T5 as backbones. In addition, we investigate pipeline and joint end-to-end architectures for incorporating visual spatial relationship classification (VSRC) information into our model. Finally, we conduct experiments on our benchmark dataset to evaluate all our models. Results show that our models are impressive, providing accurate and human-like spatial-oriented text descriptions. Meanwhile, VSRC has great potential for VSD, and the joint end-to-end architecture is the better choice for their integration. We make the dataset and codes public for research purposes.

Despite significant progress in the field, it is still challenging to create personalized visual representations that align closely with the desires and preferences of individual users. This process requires users to articulate their ideas in words that are both comprehensible to the models and accurately capture their vision, posing difficulties for many users. In this paper, we tackle this challenge by leveraging historical user interactions with the system to enhance user prompts. We propose a novel approach that involves rewriting user prompts based on a newly collected large-scale text-to-image dataset with over 300k prompts from 3115 users. Our rewriting model enhances the expressiveness and alignment of user prompts with their intended visual outputs. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our methods over baseline approaches, as evidenced in our new offline evaluation method and online tests. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/zzjchen/Tailored-Visions .

The development of AI-Generated Video (AIGV) technology has been remarkable in recent years, significantly transforming the paradigm of video content production. However, AIGVs still suffer from noticeable visual quality defects, such as noise, blurriness, frame jitter and low dynamic degree, which severely impact the user's viewing experience. Therefore, an effective automatic visual quality assessment is of great importance for AIGV content regulation and generative model improvement. In this work, we decompose the visual quality of AIGVs into three dimensions: technical quality, motion quality, and video semantics. For each dimension, we design corresponding encoder to achieve effective feature representation. Moreover, considering the outstanding performance of large language models (LLMs) in various vision and language tasks, we introduce a LLM as the quality regression module. To better enable the LLM to establish reasoning associations between multi-dimensional features and visual quality, we propose a specially designed multi-modal prompt engineering framework. Additionally, we incorporate LoRA fine-tuning technology during the training phase, allowing the LLM to better adapt to specific tasks. Our proposed method achieved second place in the NTIRE 2025 Quality Assessment of AI-Generated Content Challenge: Track 2 AI Generated video, demonstrating its effectiveness. Codes can be obtained at https://github.com/QiZelu/AIGVEval.

Recent video generation models have shown promising results in producing high-quality video clips lasting several seconds. However, these models face challenges in generating long sequences that convey clear and informative events, limiting their ability to support coherent narrations. In this paper, we present a large-scale cooking video dataset designed to advance long-form narrative generation in the cooking domain. We validate the quality of our proposed dataset in terms of visual fidelity and textual caption accuracy using state-of-the-art Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and video generation models, respectively. We further introduce a Long Narrative Video Director to enhance both visual and semantic coherence in generated videos and emphasize the role of aligning visual embeddings to achieve improved overall video quality. Our method demonstrates substantial improvements in generating visually detailed and semantically aligned keyframes, supported by finetuning techniques that integrate text and image embeddings within the video generation process. Project page: https://videoauteur.github.io/

This work introduces composed image retrieval to remote sensing. It allows to query a large image archive by image examples alternated by a textual description, enriching the descriptive power over unimodal queries, either visual or textual. Various attributes can be modified by the textual part, such as shape, color, or context. A novel method fusing image-to-image and text-to-image similarity is introduced. We demonstrate that a vision-language model possesses sufficient descriptive power and no further learning step or training data are necessary. We present a new evaluation benchmark focused on color, context, density, existence, quantity, and shape modifications. Our work not only sets the state-of-the-art for this task, but also serves as a foundational step in addressing a gap in the field of remote sensing image retrieval. Code at: https://github.com/billpsomas/rscir

Recent advances of large multi-modality models (LMM) have greatly improved the ability of image quality assessment (IQA) method to evaluate and explain the quality of visual content. However, these advancements are mostly focused on overall quality assessment, and the detailed examination of local quality, which is crucial for comprehensive visual understanding, is still largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce Q-Ground, the first framework aimed at tackling fine-scale visual quality grounding by combining large multi-modality models with detailed visual quality analysis. Central to our contribution is the introduction of the QGround-100K dataset, a novel resource containing 100k triplets of (image, quality text, distortion segmentation) to facilitate deep investigations into visual quality. The dataset comprises two parts: one with human-labeled annotations for accurate quality assessment, and another labeled automatically by LMMs such as GPT4V, which helps improve the robustness of model training while also reducing the costs of data collection. With the QGround-100K dataset, we propose a LMM-based method equipped with multi-scale feature learning to learn models capable of performing both image quality answering and distortion segmentation based on text prompts. This dual-capability approach not only refines the model's understanding of region-aware image quality but also enables it to interactively respond to complex, text-based queries about image quality and specific distortions. Q-Ground takes a step towards sophisticated visual quality analysis in a finer scale, establishing a new benchmark for future research in the area. Codes and dataset are available at https://github.com/Q-Future/Q-Ground.

Video generation is experiencing rapid growth, driven by advances in diffusion models and the development of better and larger datasets. However, producing high-quality videos remains challenging due to the high-dimensional data and the complexity of the task. Recent efforts have primarily focused on enhancing visual quality and addressing temporal inconsistencies, such as flickering. Despite progress in these areas, the generated videos often fall short in terms of motion complexity and physical plausibility, with many outputs either appearing static or exhibiting unrealistic motion. In this work, we propose a framework to improve the realism of motion in generated videos, exploring a complementary direction to much of the existing literature. Specifically, we advocate for the incorporation of a retrieval mechanism during the generation phase. The retrieved videos act as grounding signals, providing the model with demonstrations of how the objects move. Our pipeline is designed to apply to any text-to-video diffusion model, conditioning a pretrained model on the retrieved samples with minimal fine-tuning. We demonstrate the superiority of our approach through established metrics, recently proposed benchmarks, and qualitative results, and we highlight additional applications of the framework.

We present a general strategy to aligning visual generation models -- both image and video generation -- with human preference. To start with, we build VisionReward -- a fine-grained and multi-dimensional reward model. We decompose human preferences in images and videos into multiple dimensions, each represented by a series of judgment questions, linearly weighted and summed to an interpretable and accurate score. To address the challenges of video quality assessment, we systematically analyze various dynamic features of videos, which helps VisionReward surpass VideoScore by 17.2% and achieve top performance for video preference prediction. Based on VisionReward, we develop a multi-objective preference learning algorithm that effectively addresses the issue of confounding factors within preference data. Our approach significantly outperforms existing image and video scoring methods on both machine metrics and human evaluation. All code and datasets are provided at https://github.com/THUDM/VisionReward.

This position paper argues that Mean Opinion Score (MOS), while historically foundational, is no longer sufficient as the sole supervisory signal for multimedia quality assessment models. MOS reduces rich, context-sensitive human judgments to a single scalar, obscuring semantic failures, user intent, and the rationale behind quality decisions. We contend that modern quality assessment models must integrate three interdependent capabilities: (1) context-awareness, to adapt evaluations to task-specific goals and viewing conditions; (2) reasoning, to produce interpretable, evidence-grounded justifications for quality judgments; and (3) multimodality, to align perceptual and semantic cues using vision-language models. We critique the limitations of current MOS-centric benchmarks and propose a roadmap for reform: richer datasets with contextual metadata and expert rationales, and new evaluation metrics that assess semantic alignment, reasoning fidelity, and contextual sensitivity. By reframing quality assessment as a contextual, explainable, and multimodal modeling task, we aim to catalyze a shift toward more robust, human-aligned, and trustworthy evaluation systems.

Recent interest in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) for practical applications is moderated by the significant challenge of hallucination or the inconsistency between the factual information and the generated text. In this paper, we first perform an in-depth analysis of hallucinations and discover several novel insights about how and when LVLMs hallucinate. From our analysis, we show that: (1) The community's efforts have been primarily targeted towards reducing hallucinations related to visual recognition (VR) prompts (e.g., prompts that only require describing the image), thereby ignoring hallucinations for cognitive prompts (e.g., prompts that require additional skills like reasoning on contents of the image). (2) LVLMs lack visual perception, i.e., they can see but not necessarily understand or perceive the input image. We analyze responses to cognitive prompts and show that LVLMs hallucinate due to a perception gap: although LVLMs accurately recognize visual elements in the input image and possess sufficient cognitive skills, they struggle to respond accurately and hallucinate. To overcome this shortcoming, we propose Visual Description Grounded Decoding (VDGD), a simple, robust, and training-free method for alleviating hallucinations. Specifically, we first describe the image and add it as a prefix to the instruction. Next, during auto-regressive decoding, we sample from the plausible candidates according to their KL-Divergence (KLD) to the description, where lower KLD is given higher preference. Experimental results on several benchmarks and LVLMs show that VDGD improves significantly over other baselines in reducing hallucinations. We also propose VaLLu, a benchmark for the comprehensive evaluation of the cognitive capabilities of LVLMs.

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.

The ability to understand visual concepts and replicate and compose these concepts from images is a central goal for computer vision. Recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) models have lead to high definition and realistic image quality generation by learning from large databases of images and their descriptions. However, the evaluation of T2I models has focused on photorealism and limited qualitative measures of visual understanding. To quantify the ability of T2I models in learning and synthesizing novel visual concepts, we introduce ConceptBed, a large-scale dataset that consists of 284 unique visual concepts, 5K unique concept compositions, and 33K composite text prompts. Along with the dataset, we propose an evaluation metric, Concept Confidence Deviation (CCD), that uses the confidence of oracle concept classifiers to measure the alignment between concepts generated by T2I generators and concepts contained in ground truth images. We evaluate visual concepts that are either objects, attributes, or styles, and also evaluate four dimensions of compositionality: counting, attributes, relations, and actions. Our human study shows that CCD is highly correlated with human understanding of concepts. Our results point to a trade-off between learning the concepts and preserving the compositionality which existing approaches struggle to overcome.

Recent advancements in Multi-modality Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex high-level vision tasks. However, the exploration of MLLM potential in visual quality assessment, a vital aspect of low-level vision, remains limited. To address this gap, we introduce Q-Boost, a novel strategy designed to enhance low-level MLLMs in image quality assessment (IQA) and video quality assessment (VQA) tasks, which is structured around two pivotal components: 1) Triadic-Tone Integration: Ordinary prompt design simply oscillates between the binary extremes of positive and negative. Q-Boost innovates by incorporating a `middle ground' approach through neutral prompts, allowing for a more balanced and detailed assessment. 2) Multi-Prompt Ensemble: Multiple quality-centric prompts are used to mitigate bias and acquire more accurate evaluation. The experimental results show that the low-level MLLMs exhibit outstanding zeros-shot performance on the IQA/VQA tasks equipped with the Q-Boost strategy.

This paper explores the usage of multimodal image-to-text models to enhance text-based item retrieval. We propose utilizing pre-trained image captioning and tagging models, such as instructBLIP and CLIP, to generate text-based product descriptions which are combined with existing text descriptions. Our work is particularly impactful for smaller eCommerce businesses who are unable to maintain the high-quality text descriptions necessary to effectively perform item retrieval for search and recommendation use cases. We evaluate the searchability of ground-truth text, image-generated text, and combinations of both texts on several subsets of Amazon's publicly available ESCI dataset. The results demonstrate the dual capability of our proposed models to enhance the retrieval of existing text and generate highly-searchable standalone descriptions.

Generating Audio Description (AD) for movies is a challenging task that requires fine-grained visual understanding and an awareness of the characters and their names. Currently, visual language models for AD generation are limited by a lack of suitable training data, and also their evaluation is hampered by using performance measures not specialized to the AD domain. In this paper, we make three contributions: (i) We propose two approaches for constructing AD datasets with aligned video data, and build training and evaluation datasets using these. These datasets will be publicly released; (ii) We develop a Q-former-based architecture which ingests raw video and generates AD, using frozen pre-trained visual encoders and large language models; and (iii) We provide new evaluation metrics to benchmark AD quality that are well-matched to human performance. Taken together, we improve the state of the art on AD generation.

Generating accurate, informative, and hallucination-free captions for charts remains challenging for vision language models, primarily due to the lack of large-scale, high-quality datasets of real-world charts. However, existing real-world chart datasets suffer from the inclusion of extraneous information that cannot be inferred from the chart and failure to sufficiently capture structural elements and key insights. Therefore, we introduce ChartCap, a large-scale dataset of 565K real-world chart images paired with type-specific, dense captions that exclude extraneous information and highlight both structural elements and key insights in detail. To build ChartCap, we design a four-stage pipeline that generates captions using only the discernible data from the chart and employ a cycle consistency-based human verification, which accelerates quality control without sacrificing accuracy. Additionally, we propose a novel metric, the Visual Consistency Score, which evaluates caption quality by measuring the similarity between the chart regenerated from a caption and the original chart, independent of reference captions. Extensive experiments confirms that models fine-tuned on ChartCap consistently generate more accurate and informative captions with reduced hallucinations, surpassing both open-source and proprietary models and even human-annotated captions.

Few images on the Web receive alt-text descriptions that would make them accessible to blind and low vision (BLV) users. Image-based NLG systems have progressed to the point where they can begin to address this persistent societal problem, but these systems will not be fully successful unless we evaluate them on metrics that guide their development correctly. Here, we argue against current referenceless metrics -- those that don't rely on human-generated ground-truth descriptions -- on the grounds that they do not align with the needs of BLV users. The fundamental shortcoming of these metrics is that they do not take context into account, whereas contextual information is highly valued by BLV users. To substantiate these claims, we present a study with BLV participants who rated descriptions along a variety of dimensions. An in-depth analysis reveals that the lack of context-awareness makes current referenceless metrics inadequate for advancing image accessibility. As a proof-of-concept, we provide a contextual version of the referenceless metric CLIPScore which begins to address the disconnect to the BLV data. An accessible HTML version of this paper is available at https://elisakreiss.github.io/contextual-description-evaluation/paper/reflessmetrics.html

The vision and language generative models have been overgrown in recent years. For video generation, various open-sourced models and public-available services are released for generating high-visual quality videos. However, these methods often use a few academic metrics, for example, FVD or IS, to evaluate the performance. We argue that it is hard to judge the large conditional generative models from the simple metrics since these models are often trained on very large datasets with multi-aspect abilities. Thus, we propose a new framework and pipeline to exhaustively evaluate the performance of the generated videos. To achieve this, we first conduct a new prompt list for text-to-video generation by analyzing the real-world prompt list with the help of the large language model. Then, we evaluate the state-of-the-art video generative models on our carefully designed benchmarks, in terms of visual qualities, content qualities, motion qualities, and text-caption alignment with around 18 objective metrics. To obtain the final leaderboard of the models, we also fit a series of coefficients to align the objective metrics to the users' opinions. Based on the proposed opinion alignment method, our final score shows a higher correlation than simply averaging the metrics, showing the effectiveness of the proposed evaluation method.

The web is littered with images, once created for human consumption and now increasingly interpreted by agents using vision-language models (VLMs). These agents make visual decisions at scale, deciding what to click, recommend, or buy. Yet, we know little about the structure of their visual preferences. We introduce a framework for studying this by placing VLMs in controlled image-based choice tasks and systematically perturbing their inputs. Our key idea is to treat the agent's decision function as a latent visual utility that can be inferred through revealed preference: choices between systematically edited images. Starting from common images, such as product photos, we propose methods for visual prompt optimization, adapting text optimization methods to iteratively propose and apply visually plausible modifications using an image generation model (such as in composition, lighting, or background). We then evaluate which edits increase selection probability. Through large-scale experiments on frontier VLMs, we demonstrate that optimized edits significantly shift choice probabilities in head-to-head comparisons. We develop an automatic interpretability pipeline to explain these preferences, identifying consistent visual themes that drive selection. We argue that this approach offers a practical and efficient way to surface visual vulnerabilities, safety concerns that might otherwise be discovered implicitly in the wild, supporting more proactive auditing and governance of image-based AI agents.

A key challenge in evaluating VLMs is testing models' ability to analyze visual content independently from their textual priors. Recent benchmarks such as BLINK probe visual perception through visual prompting, where questions about visual content are paired with coordinates to which the question refers, with the coordinates explicitly marked in the image itself. While these benchmarks are an important part of VLM evaluation, we find that existing models are surprisingly fragile to seemingly irrelevant details of visual prompting: simply changing a visual marker from red to blue can completely change rankings among models on a leaderboard. By evaluating nine commonly-used open- and closed-source VLMs on two visually prompted tasks, we demonstrate how details in benchmark setup, including visual marker design and dataset size, have a significant influence on model performance and leaderboard rankings. These effects can even be exploited to lift weaker models above stronger ones; for instance, slightly increasing the size of the visual marker results in open-source InternVL3-8B ranking alongside or better than much larger proprietary models like Gemini 2.5 Pro. We further show that low-level inference choices that are often ignored in benchmarking, such as JPEG compression levels in API calls, can also cause model lineup changes. These details have substantially larger impacts on visually prompted benchmarks than on conventional semantic VLM evaluations. To mitigate this instability, we curate existing datasets to create VPBench, a larger visually prompted benchmark with 16 visual marker variants. We open-source VPBench and our analysis framework at: https://lisadunlap.github.io/vpbench/.

Recent progress has been made in region-aware vision-language modeling, particularly with the emergence of the Describe Anything Model (DAM). DAM is capable of generating detailed descriptions of any specific image areas or objects without the need for additional localized image-text alignment supervision. We hypothesize that such region-level descriptive capability is beneficial for the task of Visual Question Answering (VQA), especially in challenging scenarios involving images with dense text. In such settings, the fine-grained extraction of textual information is crucial to producing correct answers. Motivated by this, we introduce DAM-QA, a framework with a tailored evaluation protocol, developed to investigate and harness the region-aware capabilities from DAM for the text-rich VQA problem that requires reasoning over text-based information within images. DAM-QA incorporates a mechanism that aggregates answers from multiple regional views of image content, enabling more effective identification of evidence that may be tied to text-related elements. Experiments on six VQA benchmarks show that our approach consistently outperforms the baseline DAM, with a notable 7+ point gain on DocVQA. DAM-QA also achieves the best overall performance among region-aware models with fewer parameters, significantly narrowing the gap with strong generalist VLMs. These results highlight the potential of DAM-like models for text-rich and broader VQA tasks when paired with efficient usage and integration strategies. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Linvyl/DAM-QA.git.

In no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA), the challenge of limited dataset sizes hampers the development of robust and generalizable models. Conventional methods address this issue by utilizing large datasets to extract rich representations for IQA. Also, some approaches propose vision language models (VLM) based IQA, but the domain gap between generic VLM and IQA constrains their scalability. In this work, we propose a novel pretraining framework that constructs a generalizable representation for IQA by selectively extracting quality-related knowledge from VLM and leveraging the scalability of large datasets. Specifically, we select optimal text prompts for five representative image quality attributes and use VLM to generate pseudo-labels. Numerous attribute-aware pseudo-labels can be generated with large image datasets, allowing our IQA model to learn rich representations about image quality. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple IQA datasets and exhibits remarkable generalization capabilities. Leveraging these strengths, we propose several applications, such as evaluating image generation models and training image enhancement models, demonstrating our model's real-world applicability.

Captions that describe or explain charts help improve recall and comprehension of the depicted data and provide a more accessible medium for people with visual disabilities. However, current approaches for automatically generating such captions struggle to articulate the perceptual or cognitive features that are the hallmark of charts (e.g., complex trends and patterns). In response, we introduce VisText: a dataset of 12,441 pairs of charts and captions that describe the charts' construction, report key statistics, and identify perceptual and cognitive phenomena. In VisText, a chart is available as three representations: a rasterized image, a backing data table, and a scene graph -- a hierarchical representation of a chart's visual elements akin to a web page's Document Object Model (DOM). To evaluate the impact of VisText, we fine-tune state-of-the-art language models on our chart captioning task and apply prefix-tuning to produce captions that vary the semantic content they convey. Our models generate coherent, semantically rich captions and perform on par with state-of-the-art chart captioning models across machine translation and text generation metrics. Through qualitative analysis, we identify six broad categories of errors that our models make that can inform future work.

Vision language models (VLM) have demonstrated remarkable performance across various downstream tasks. However, understanding fine-grained visual-linguistic concepts, such as attributes and inter-object relationships, remains a significant challenge. While several benchmarks aim to evaluate VLMs in finer granularity, their primary focus remains on the linguistic aspect, neglecting the visual dimension. Here, we highlight the importance of evaluating VLMs from both a textual and visual perspective. We introduce a progressive pipeline to synthesize images that vary in a specific attribute while ensuring consistency in all other aspects. Utilizing this data engine, we carefully design a benchmark, SPEC, to diagnose the comprehension of object size, position, existence, and count. Subsequently, we conduct a thorough evaluation of four leading VLMs on SPEC. Surprisingly, their performance is close to random guess, revealing significant limitations. With this in mind, we propose a simple yet effective approach to optimize VLMs in fine-grained understanding, achieving significant improvements on SPEC without compromising the zero-shot performance. Results on two additional fine-grained benchmarks also show consistent improvements, further validating the transferability of our approach. Code and data are available at https://github.com/wjpoom/SPEC.

The progress in the generation of synthetic images has made it crucial to assess their quality. While several metrics have been proposed to assess the rendering of images, it is crucial for Text-to-Image (T2I) models, which generate images based on a prompt, to consider additional aspects such as to which extent the generated image matches the important content of the prompt. Moreover, although the generated images usually result from a random starting point, the influence of this one is generally not considered. In this article, we propose a new metric based on prompt templates to study the alignment between the content specified in the prompt and the corresponding generated images. It allows us to better characterize the alignment in terms of the type of the specified objects, their number, and their color. We conducted a study on several recent T2I models about various aspects. An additional interesting result we obtained with our approach is that image quality can vary drastically depending on the latent noise used as a seed for the images. We also quantify the influence of the number of concepts in the prompt, their order as well as their (color) attributes. Finally, our method allows us to identify some latent seeds that produce better images than others, opening novel directions of research on this understudied topic.

In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) driven video generation has garnered significant attention due to advancements in stable diffusion and large language model techniques. Thus, there is a great demand for accurate video quality assessment (VQA) models to measure the perceptual quality of AI-generated content (AIGC) videos as well as optimize video generation techniques. However, assessing the quality of AIGC videos is quite challenging due to the highly complex distortions they exhibit (e.g., unnatural action, irrational objects, etc.). Therefore, in this paper, we try to systemically investigate the AIGC-VQA problem from both subjective and objective quality assessment perspectives. For the subjective perspective, we construct a Large-scale Generated Vdeo Quality assessment (LGVQ) dataset, consisting of 2,808 AIGC videos generated by 6 video generation models using 468 carefully selected text prompts. Unlike previous subjective VQA experiments, we evaluate the perceptual quality of AIGC videos from three dimensions: spatial quality, temporal quality, and text-to-video alignment, which hold utmost importance for current video generation techniques. For the objective perspective, we establish a benchmark for evaluating existing quality assessment metrics on the LGVQ dataset, which reveals that current metrics perform poorly on the LGVQ dataset. Thus, we propose a Unify Generated Video Quality assessment (UGVQ) model to comprehensively and accurately evaluate the quality of AIGC videos across three aspects using a unified model, which uses visual, textual and motion features of video and corresponding prompt, and integrates key features to enhance feature expression. We hope that our benchmark can promote the development of quality evaluation metrics for AIGC videos. The LGVQ dataset and the UGVQ metric will be publicly released.

Recent advances in AI-generated content (AIGC) have led to the emergence of powerful text-to-video generation models. Despite these successes, evaluating the quality of AIGC-generated videos remains challenging due to limited generalization, lack of temporal awareness, heavy reliance on large-scale annotated datasets, and the lack of effective interaction with generation models. Most current approaches rely on supervised finetuning of vision-language models (VLMs), which often require large-scale annotated datasets and tend to decouple understanding and generation. To address these shortcomings, we propose VQ-Insight, a novel reasoning-style VLM framework for AIGC video quality assessment. Our approach features: (1) a progressive video quality learning scheme that combines image quality warm-up, general task-specific temporal learning, and joint optimization with the video generation model; (2) the design of multi-dimension scoring rewards, preference comparison rewards, and temporal modeling rewards to enhance both generalization and specialization in video quality evaluation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VQ-Insight consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in preference comparison, multi-dimension scoring, and natural video scoring, bringing significant improvements for video generation tasks.

Evaluating text-to-vision content hinges on two crucial aspects: visual quality and alignment. While significant progress has been made in developing objective models to assess these dimensions, the performance of such models heavily relies on the scale and quality of human annotations. According to Scaling Law, increasing the number of human-labeled instances follows a predictable pattern that enhances the performance of evaluation models. Therefore, we introduce a comprehensive dataset designed to Evaluate Visual quality and Alignment Level for text-to-vision content (Q-EVAL-100K), featuring the largest collection of human-labeled Mean Opinion Scores (MOS) for the mentioned two aspects. The Q-EVAL-100K dataset encompasses both text-to-image and text-to-video models, with 960K human annotations specifically focused on visual quality and alignment for 100K instances (60K images and 40K videos). Leveraging this dataset with context prompt, we propose Q-Eval-Score, a unified model capable of evaluating both visual quality and alignment with special improvements for handling long-text prompt alignment. Experimental results indicate that the proposed Q-Eval-Score achieves superior performance on both visual quality and alignment, with strong generalization capabilities across other benchmarks. These findings highlight the significant value of the Q-EVAL-100K dataset. Data and codes will be available at https://github.com/zzc-1998/Q-Eval.

Well-designed prompts have demonstrated the potential to guide text-to-image models in generating amazing images. Although existing prompt engineering methods can provide high-level guidance, it is challenging for novice users to achieve the desired results by manually entering prompts due to a discrepancy between novice-user-input prompts and the model-preferred prompts. To bridge the distribution gap between user input behavior and model training datasets, we first construct a novel Coarse-Fine Granularity Prompts dataset (CFP) and propose a novel User-Friendly Fine-Grained Text Generation framework (UF-FGTG) for automated prompt optimization. For CFP, we construct a novel dataset for text-to-image tasks that combines coarse and fine-grained prompts to facilitate the development of automated prompt generation methods. For UF-FGTG, we propose a novel framework that automatically translates user-input prompts into model-preferred prompts. Specifically, we propose a prompt refiner that continually rewrites prompts to empower users to select results that align with their unique needs. Meanwhile, we integrate image-related loss functions from the text-to-image model into the training process of text generation to generate model-preferred prompts. Additionally, we propose an adaptive feature extraction module to ensure diversity in the generated results. Experiments demonstrate that our approach is capable of generating more visually appealing and diverse images than previous state-of-the-art methods, achieving an average improvement of 5% across six quality and aesthetic metrics.

The ability to integrate context, including perceptual and temporal cues, plays a pivotal role in grounding the meaning of a linguistic utterance. In order to measure to what extent current vision-and-language models master this ability, we devise a new multimodal challenge, Image Retrieval from Contextual Descriptions (ImageCoDe). In particular, models are tasked with retrieving the correct image from a set of 10 minimally contrastive candidates based on a contextual description. As such, each description contains only the details that help distinguish between images. Because of this, descriptions tend to be complex in terms of syntax and discourse and require drawing pragmatic inferences. Images are sourced from both static pictures and video frames. We benchmark several state-of-the-art models, including both cross-encoders such as ViLBERT and bi-encoders such as CLIP, on ImageCoDe. Our results reveal that these models dramatically lag behind human performance: the best variant achieves an accuracy of 20.9 on video frames and 59.4 on static pictures, compared with 90.8 in humans. Furthermore, we experiment with new model variants that are better equipped to incorporate visual and temporal context into their representations, which achieve modest gains. Our hope is that ImageCoDE will foster progress in grounded language understanding by encouraging models to focus on fine-grained visual differences.

In text-to-image (T2I) generation, a prevalent training technique involves utilizing Vision Language Models (VLMs) for image re-captioning. Even though VLMs are known to exhibit hallucination, generating descriptive content that deviates from the visual reality, the ramifications of such caption hallucinations on T2I generation performance remain under-explored. Through our empirical investigation, we first establish a comprehensive dataset comprising VLM-generated captions, and then systematically analyze how caption hallucination influences generation outcomes. Our findings reveal that (1) the disparities in caption quality persistently impact model outputs during fine-tuning. (2) VLMs confidence scores serve as reliable indicators for detecting and characterizing noise-related patterns in the data distribution. (3) even subtle variations in caption fidelity have significant effects on the quality of learned representations. These findings collectively emphasize the profound impact of caption quality on model performance and highlight the need for more sophisticated robust training algorithm in T2I. In response to these observations, we propose a approach leveraging VLM confidence score to mitigate caption noise, thereby enhancing the robustness of T2I models against hallucination in caption.

High-quality image captions play a crucial role in improving the performance of cross-modal applications such as text-to-image generation, text-to-video generation, and text-image retrieval. To generate long-form, high-quality captions, many recent studies have employed multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, current MLLMs often produce captions that lack fine-grained details or suffer from hallucinations, a challenge that persists in both open-source and closed-source models. Inspired by Feature-Integration theory, which suggests that attention must focus on specific regions to integrate visual information effectively, we propose a divide-then-aggregate strategy. Our method first divides the image into semantic and spatial patches to extract fine-grained details, enhancing the model's local perception of the image. These local details are then hierarchically aggregated to generate a comprehensive global description. To address hallucinations and inconsistencies in the generated captions, we apply a semantic-level filtering process during hierarchical aggregation. This training-free pipeline can be applied to both open-source models (LLaVA-1.5, LLaVA-1.6, Mini-Gemini) and closed-source models (Claude-3.5-Sonnet, GPT-4o, GLM-4V-Plus). Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method generates more detailed, reliable captions, advancing multimodal description generation without requiring model retraining. The source code are available at https://github.com/GeWu-Lab/Patch-Matters

The rapid growth of user-generated (video) content (UGC) has driven increased demand for research on no-reference (NR) perceptual video quality assessment (VQA). NR-VQA is a key component for large-scale video quality monitoring in social media and streaming applications where a pristine reference is not available. This paper proposes a novel NR-VQA model based on spatio-temporal fragmentation driven by inter-frame variations. By leveraging these inter-frame differences, the model progressively analyses quality-sensitive regions at multiple levels: frames, patches, and fragmented frames. It integrates frames, fragmented residuals, and fragmented frames aligned with residuals to effectively capture global and local information. The model extracts both 2D and 3D features in order to characterize these spatio-temporal variations. Experiments conducted on five UGC datasets and against state-of-the-art models ranked our proposed method among the top 2 in terms of average rank correlation (DIVA-VQA-L: 0.898 and DIVA-VQA-B: 0.886). The improved performance is offered at a low runtime complexity, with DIVA-VQA-B ranked top and DIVA-VQA-L third on average compared to the fastest existing NR-VQA method. Code and models are publicly available at: https://github.com/xinyiW915/DIVA-VQA.

It has recently been discovered that using a pre-trained vision-language model (VLM), e.g., CLIP, to align a whole query image with several finer text descriptions generated by a large language model can significantly enhance zero-shot performance. However, in this paper, we empirically find that the finer descriptions tend to align more effectively with local areas of the query image rather than the whole image, and then we theoretically validate this finding. Thus, we present a method called weighted visual-text cross alignment (WCA). This method begins with a localized visual prompting technique, designed to identify local visual areas within the query image. The local visual areas are then cross-aligned with the finer descriptions by creating a similarity matrix using the pre-trained VLM. To determine how well a query image aligns with each category, we develop a score function based on the weighted similarities in this matrix. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly improves zero-shot performance across various datasets, achieving results that are even comparable to few-shot learning methods.

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.

This paper reviews the first NTIRE challenge on quality enhancement of compressed video, with a focus on the proposed methods and results. In this challenge, the new Large-scale Diverse Video (LDV) dataset is employed. The challenge has three tracks. Tracks 1 and 2 aim at enhancing the videos compressed by HEVC at a fixed QP, while Track 3 is designed for enhancing the videos compressed by x265 at a fixed bit-rate. Besides, the quality enhancement of Tracks 1 and 3 targets at improving the fidelity (PSNR), and Track 2 targets at enhancing the perceptual quality. The three tracks totally attract 482 registrations. In the test phase, 12 teams, 8 teams and 11 teams submitted the final results of Tracks 1, 2 and 3, respectively. The proposed methods and solutions gauge the state-of-the-art of video quality enhancement. The homepage of the challenge: https://github.com/RenYang-home/NTIRE21_VEnh

Vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP have shown promising performance on a variety of recognition tasks using the standard zero-shot classification procedure -- computing similarity between the query image and the embedded words for each category. By only using the category name, they neglect to make use of the rich context of additional information that language affords. The procedure gives no intermediate understanding of why a category is chosen, and furthermore provides no mechanism for adjusting the criteria used towards this decision. We present an alternative framework for classification with VLMs, which we call classification by description. We ask VLMs to check for descriptive features rather than broad categories: to find a tiger, look for its stripes; its claws; and more. By basing decisions on these descriptors, we can provide additional cues that encourage using the features we want to be used. In the process, we can get a clear idea of what features the model uses to construct its decision; it gains some level of inherent explainability. We query large language models (e.g., GPT-3) for these descriptors to obtain them in a scalable way. Extensive experiments show our framework has numerous advantages past interpretability. We show improvements in accuracy on ImageNet across distribution shifts; demonstrate the ability to adapt VLMs to recognize concepts unseen during training; and illustrate how descriptors can be edited to effectively mitigate bias compared to the baseline.

Vision-language models in pathology enable multimodal case retrieval and automated report generation. Many of the models developed so far, however, have been trained on pathology reports that include information which cannot be inferred from paired whole slide images (e.g., patient history), potentially leading to hallucinated sentences in generated reports. To this end, we investigate how the selection of information from pathology reports for vision-language modeling affects the quality of the multimodal representations and generated reports. More concretely, we compare a model trained on full reports against a model trained on preprocessed reports that only include sentences describing the cell and tissue appearances based on the H&E-stained slides. For the experiments, we built upon the BLIP-2 framework and used a cutaneous melanocytic lesion dataset of 42,433 H&E-stained whole slide images and 19,636 corresponding pathology reports. Model performance was assessed using image-to-text and text-to-image retrieval, as well as qualitative evaluation of the generated reports by an expert pathologist. Our results demonstrate that text preprocessing prevents hallucination in report generation. Despite the improvement in the quality of the generated reports, training the vision-language model on full reports showed better cross-modal retrieval performance.

Evaluation of automatic video summaries is a challenging problem. In the past years, some evaluation methods are presented that utilize only a single feature like color feature to detect similarity between automatic video summaries and ground-truth user summaries. One of the drawbacks of using a single feature is that sometimes it gives a false similarity detection which makes the assessment of the quality of the generated video summary less perceptual and not accurate. In this paper, a novel method for evaluating automatic video summaries is presented. This method is based on comparing automatic video summaries generated by video summarization techniques with ground-truth user summaries. The objective of this evaluation method is to quantify the quality of video summaries, and allow comparing different video summarization techniques utilizing both color and texture features of the video frames and using the Bhattacharya distance as a dissimilarity measure due to its advantages. Our Experiments show that the proposed evaluation method overcomes the drawbacks of other methods and gives a more perceptual evaluation of the quality of the automatic video summaries.

Short-form UGC video platforms, like Kwai and TikTok, have been an emerging and irreplaceable mainstream media form, thriving on user-friendly engagement, and kaleidoscope creation, etc. However, the advancing content-generation modes, e.g., special effects, and sophisticated processing workflows, e.g., de-artifacts, have introduced significant challenges to recent UGC video quality assessment: (i) the ambiguous contents hinder the identification of quality-determined regions. (ii) the diverse and complicated hybrid distortions are hard to distinguish. To tackle the above challenges and assist in the development of short-form videos, we establish the first large-scale Kaleidoscope short Video database for Quality assessment, termed KVQ, which comprises 600 user-uploaded short videos and 3600 processed videos through the diverse practical processing workflows, including pre-processing, transcoding, and enhancement. Among them, the absolute quality score of each video and partial ranking score among indistinguishable samples are provided by a team of professional researchers specializing in image processing. Based on this database, we propose the first short-form video quality evaluator, i.e., KSVQE, which enables the quality evaluator to identify the quality-determined semantics with the content understanding of large vision language models (i.e., CLIP) and distinguish the distortions with the distortion understanding module. Experimental results have shown the effectiveness of KSVQE on our KVQ database and popular VQA databases.

Training text-to-image models with web scale image-text pairs enables the generation of a wide range of visual concepts from text. However, these pre-trained models often face challenges when it comes to generating highly aesthetic images. This creates the need for aesthetic alignment post pre-training. In this paper, we propose quality-tuning to effectively guide a pre-trained model to exclusively generate highly visually appealing images, while maintaining generality across visual concepts. Our key insight is that supervised fine-tuning with a set of surprisingly small but extremely visually appealing images can significantly improve the generation quality. We pre-train a latent diffusion model on 1.1 billion image-text pairs and fine-tune it with only a few thousand carefully selected high-quality images. The resulting model, Emu, achieves a win rate of 82.9% compared with its pre-trained only counterpart. Compared to the state-of-the-art SDXLv1.0, Emu is preferred 68.4% and 71.3% of the time on visual appeal on the standard PartiPrompts and our Open User Input benchmark based on the real-world usage of text-to-image models. In addition, we show that quality-tuning is a generic approach that is also effective for other architectures, including pixel diffusion and masked generative transformer models.

Composed image retrieval (CIR) enables users to search images using a reference image combined with textual modifications. Recent advances in vision-language models have improved CIR, but dataset limitations remain a barrier. Existing datasets often rely on simplistic, ambiguous, or insufficient manual annotations, hindering fine-grained retrieval. We introduce good4cir, a structured pipeline leveraging vision-language models to generate high-quality synthetic annotations. Our method involves: (1) extracting fine-grained object descriptions from query images, (2) generating comparable descriptions for target images, and (3) synthesizing textual instructions capturing meaningful transformations between images. This reduces hallucination, enhances modification diversity, and ensures object-level consistency. Applying our method improves existing datasets and enables creating new datasets across diverse domains. Results demonstrate improved retrieval accuracy for CIR models trained on our pipeline-generated datasets. We release our dataset construction framework to support further research in CIR and multi-modal retrieval.

In this paper, we propose a method for generating layouts for image-based advertisements by leveraging a Vision-Language Model (VLM). Conventional advertisement layout techniques have predominantly relied on saliency mapping to detect salient regions within a background image, but such approaches often fail to fully account for the image's detailed composition and semantic content. To overcome this limitation, our method harnesses a VLM to recognize the products and other elements depicted in the background and to inform the placement of text and logos. The proposed layout-generation pipeline consists of two steps. In the first step, the VLM analyzes the image to identify object types and their spatial relationships, then produces a text-based "placement plan" based on this analysis. In the second step, that plan is rendered into the final layout by generating HTML-format code. We validated the effectiveness of our approach through evaluation experiments, conducting both quantitative and qualitative comparisons against existing methods. The results demonstrate that by explicitly considering the background image's content, our method produces noticeably higher-quality advertisement layouts.

Recent advancements in text-to-image generation have significantly enhanced the quality of synthesized images. Despite this progress, evaluations predominantly focus on aesthetic appeal or alignment with text prompts. Consequently, there is limited understanding of whether these models can accurately represent a wide variety of realistic visual entities - a task requiring real-world knowledge. To address this gap, we propose a benchmark focused on evaluating Knowledge-InTensive image generaTion on real-world ENtities (i.e., KITTEN). Using KITTEN, we conduct a systematic study on the fidelity of entities in text-to-image generation models, focusing on their ability to generate a wide range of real-world visual entities, such as landmark buildings, aircraft, plants, and animals. We evaluate the latest text-to-image models and retrieval-augmented customization models using both automatic metrics and carefully-designed human evaluations, with an emphasis on the fidelity of entities in the generated images. Our findings reveal that even the most advanced text-to-image models often fail to generate entities with accurate visual details. Although retrieval-augmented models can enhance the fidelity of entity by incorporating reference images during testing, they often over-rely on these references and struggle to produce novel configurations of the entity as requested in creative text prompts.

The quality of the video dataset (image quality, resolution, and fine-grained caption) greatly influences the performance of the video generation model. The growing demand for video applications sets higher requirements for high-quality video generation models. For example, the generation of movie-level Ultra-High Definition (UHD) videos and the creation of 4K short video content. However, the existing public datasets cannot support related research and applications. In this paper, we first propose a high-quality open-sourced UHD-4K (22.4\% of which are 8K) text-to-video dataset named UltraVideo, which contains a wide range of topics (more than 100 kinds), and each video has 9 structured captions with one summarized caption (average of 824 words). Specifically, we carefully design a highly automated curation process with four stages to obtain the final high-quality dataset: i) collection of diverse and high-quality video clips. ii) statistical data filtering. iii) model-based data purification. iv) generation of comprehensive, structured captions. In addition, we expand Wan to UltraWan-1K/-4K, which can natively generate high-quality 1K/4K videos with more consistent text controllability, demonstrating the effectiveness of our data curation.We believe that this work can make a significant contribution to future research on UHD video generation. UltraVideo dataset and UltraWan models are available at https://xzc-zju.github.io/projects/UltraVideo.

We introduce a novel Image Quality Assessment (IQA) dataset comprising 6073 UHD-1 (4K) images, annotated at a fixed width of 3840 pixels. Contrary to existing No-Reference (NR) IQA datasets, ours focuses on highly aesthetic photos of high technical quality, filling a gap in the literature. The images, carefully curated to exclude synthetic content, are sufficiently diverse to train general NR-IQA models. Importantly, the dataset is annotated with perceptual quality ratings obtained through a crowdsourcing study. Ten expert raters, comprising photographers and graphics artists, assessed each image at least twice in multiple sessions spanning several days, resulting in 20 highly reliable ratings per image. Annotators were rigorously selected based on several metrics, including self-consistency, to ensure their reliability. The dataset includes rich metadata with user and machine-generated tags from over 5,000 categories and popularity indicators such as favorites, likes, downloads, and views. With its unique characteristics, such as its focus on high-quality images, reliable crowdsourced annotations, and high annotation resolution, our dataset opens up new opportunities for advancing perceptual image quality assessment research and developing practical NR-IQA models that apply to modern photos. Our dataset is available at https://database.mmsp-kn.de/uhd-iqa-benchmark-database.html

While text-to-visual models now produce photo-realistic images and videos, they struggle with compositional text prompts involving attributes, relationships, and higher-order reasoning such as logic and comparison. In this work, we conduct an extensive human study on GenAI-Bench to evaluate the performance of leading image and video generation models in various aspects of compositional text-to-visual generation. We also compare automated evaluation metrics against our collected human ratings and find that VQAScore -- a metric measuring the likelihood that a VQA model views an image as accurately depicting the prompt -- significantly outperforms previous metrics such as CLIPScore. In addition, VQAScore can improve generation in a black-box manner (without finetuning) via simply ranking a few (3 to 9) candidate images. Ranking by VQAScore is 2x to 3x more effective than other scoring methods like PickScore, HPSv2, and ImageReward at improving human alignment ratings for DALL-E 3 and Stable Diffusion, especially on compositional prompts that require advanced visio-linguistic reasoning. We will release a new GenAI-Rank benchmark with over 40,000 human ratings to evaluate scoring metrics on ranking images generated from the same prompt. Lastly, we discuss promising areas for improvement in VQAScore, such as addressing fine-grained visual details. We will release all human ratings (over 80,000) to facilitate scientific benchmarking of both generative models and automated metrics.