Livestreaming has become increasingly prevalent in modern visual communication, where automatic camera quality tuning is essential for delivering superior user Quality of Experience (QoE). Such tuning requires accurate blind image quality assessment (BIQA) to guide parameter optimization decisions. Unfortunately, the existing BIQA models typically only predict an overall coarse-grained quality score, which cannot provide fine-grained perceptual guidance for precise camera parameter tuning. To bridge this gap, we first establish FGLive-10K, a comprehensive fine-grained BIQA database containing 10,185 high-resolution images captured under varying camera parameter configurations across diverse livestreaming scenarios. The dataset features 50,925 multi-attribute quality annotations and 19,234 fine-grained pairwise preference annotations. Based on FGLive-10K, we further develop TuningIQA, a fine-grained BIQA metric for livestreaming camera tuning, which integrates human-aware feature extraction and graph-based camera parameter fusion. Extensive experiments and comparisons demonstrate that TuningIQA significantly outperforms state-of-the-art BIQA methods in both score regression and fine-grained quality ranking, achieving superior performance when deployed for livestreaming camera tuning.

Recent years have witnessed remarkable achievements in perceptual image restoration (IR), creating an urgent demand for accurate image quality assessment (IQA), which is essential for both performance comparison and algorithm optimization. Unfortunately, the existing IQA metrics exhibit inherent weakness for IR task, particularly when distinguishing fine-grained quality differences among restored images. To address this dilemma, we contribute the first-of-its-kind fine-grained image quality assessment dataset for image restoration, termed FGRestore, comprising 18,408 restored images across six common IR tasks. Beyond conventional scalar quality scores, FGRestore was also annotated with 30,886 fine-grained pairwise preferences. Based on FGRestore, a comprehensive benchmark was conducted on the existing IQA metrics, which reveal significant inconsistencies between score-based IQA evaluations and the fine-grained restoration quality. Motivated by these findings, we further propose FGResQ, a new IQA model specifically designed for image restoration, which features both coarse-grained score regression and fine-grained quality ranking. Extensive experiments and comparisons demonstrate that FGResQ significantly outperforms state-of-the-art IQA metrics.

The increasing popularity of long Text-to-Image (T2I) generation has created an urgent need for automatic and interpretable models that can evaluate the image-text alignment in long prompt scenarios. However, the existing T2I alignment benchmarks predominantly focus on short prompt scenarios and only provide MOS or Likert scale annotations. This inherent limitation hinders the development of long T2I evaluators, particularly in terms of the interpretability of alignment. In this study, we contribute LongT2IBench, which comprises 14K long text-image pairs accompanied by graph-structured human annotations. Given the detail-intensive nature of long prompts, we first design a Generate-Refine-Qualify annotation protocol to convert them into textual graph structures that encompass entities, attributes, and relations. Through this transformation, fine-grained alignment annotations are achieved based on these granular elements. Finally, the graph-structed annotations are converted into alignment scores and interpretations to facilitate the design of T2I evaluation models. Based on LongT2IBench, we further propose LongT2IExpert, a LongT2I evaluator that enables multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) to provide both quantitative scores and structured interpretations through an instruction-tuning process with Hierarchical Alignment Chain-of-Thought (CoT). Extensive experiments and comparisons demonstrate the superiority of the proposed LongT2IExpert in alignment evaluation and interpretation.

The perception of image aesthetics is built upon the understanding of semantic content. However, how to evaluate the aesthetic quality of images with diversified semantic backgrounds remains challenging in image aesthetics assessment (IAA). To address the dilemma, this paper presents a semantics-aware image aesthetics assessment approach, which first analyzes the semantic content of images and then models the aesthetic distinctions among images from two perspectives, i.e., aesthetic attribute and aesthetic level. Concretely, we propose two strategies, dubbed tag matching and contrastive ranking, to extract knowledge pertaining to image aesthetics. The tag matching identifies the semantic category and the dominant aesthetic attributes based on predefined tag libraries. The contrastive ranking is designed to uncover the comparative relationships among images with different aesthetic levels but similar semantic backgrounds. In the process of contrastive ranking, the impact of long-tailed distribution of aesthetic data is also considered by balanced sampling and traversal contrastive learning. Extensive experiments and comparisons on three benchmark IAA databases demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed model in terms of both prediction accuracy and alleviating long-tailed effect. The code will be public at https://github.com/yzc-ippl/TMCR **REMOVE 2nd URL**://github.com/yzc-ippl/TMCR.

The highly abstract nature of image aesthetics perception (IAP) poses a significant challenge for current multimodal large language models (MLLMs). The lack of human-annotated multi-modality aesthetic data further exacerbates this dilemma, resulting in MLLMs falling short of aesthetics perception capabilities. To address the above challenge, we first introduce a comprehensively annotated Aesthetic Multi-Modality Instruction Tuning (AesMMIT) dataset, which serves as the footstone for building multi-modality aesthetics foundation models. Specifically, to align MLLMs with human aesthetics perception, we construct a corpus-rich aesthetic critique database with 21,904 diverse-sourced images and 88K human natural language feedbacks, which are collected via progressive questions, ranging from coarse-grained aesthetic grades to fine-grained aesthetic descriptions. To ensure that MLLMs can handle diverse queries, we further prompt GPT to refine the aesthetic critiques and assemble the large-scale aesthetic instruction tuning dataset, i.e. AesMMIT, which consists of 409K multi-typed instructions to activate stronger aesthetic capabilities. Based on the AesMMIT database, we fine-tune the open-sourced general foundation models, achieving multi-modality Aesthetic Expert models, dubbed AesExpert. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed AesExpert models deliver significantly better aesthetic perception performances than the state-of-the-art MLLMs, including the most advanced GPT-4V and Gemini-Pro-Vision. Project Page: https://yipoh.github.io/aes-expert/.

Personalized image aesthetics assessment (PIAA) is aimed at modeling the unique aesthetic preferences of individuals, based on which personalized aesthetic scores are predicted. People have different standards for image aesthetics, and accordingly, images rated at the same aesthetic level by different users explicitly reveal their aesthetic preferences. However, previous PIAA models treat each individual as an isolated optimization target, failing to take full advantage of the contrastive information among users. Further, although people's aesthetic preferences are unique, they still share some commonalities, meaning that PIAA models could be built on the basis of generic aesthetics. Motivated by the above facts, this article presents a Multi-level Transitional Contrast Learning (MTCL) framework for PIAA by transiting features from generic aesthetics to personalized aesthetics via contrastive learning. First, a generic image aesthetics assessment network is pre-trained to learn the common aesthetic features. Then, image sets rated to have the same aesthetic levels by different users are employed to learn the differentiated aesthetic features through multiple level-wise contrast learning based on the generic aesthetic features. Finally, a target user's PIAA model is built by integrating generic and differentiated aesthetic features. Extensive experiments on four benchmark PIAA databases demonstrate that the proposed MTCL model outperforms the state-of-the-arts.