Preference-Guided Debiasing for No-Reference Enhancement Image Quality Assessment

Current no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) models for enhanced images often struggle to generalize, as they tend to overfit to the distinct patterns of specific enhancement algorithms rather than evaluating genuine perceptual quality. To address this issue, we propose a preference-guided debiasing framework for no-reference enhancement image quality assessment (EIQA). Specifically, we first learn a continuous enhancement-preference embedding space using supervised contrastive learning, where images generated by similar enhancement styles are encouraged to have closer representations. Based on this, we further estimate the enhancement-induced nuisance component contained in the raw quality representation and remove it before quality regression. In this way, the model is guided to focus on algorithm-invariant perceptual quality cues instead of enhancement-specific visual fingerprints. To facilitate stable optimization, we adopt a two-stage training strategy that first learns the enhancement-preference space and then performs debiased quality prediction. Extensive experiments on public EIQA benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method effectively mitigates algorithm-induced representation bias and achieves superior robustness and cross-algorithm generalization compared with existing approaches.

Evaluating Image Editing with LLMs: A Comprehensive Benchmark and Intermediate-Layer Probing Approach

Evaluating text-guided image editing (TIE) methods remains a challenging problem, as reliable assessment should simultaneously consider perceptual quality, alignment with textual instructions, and preservation of original image content. Despite rapid progress in TIE models, existing evaluation benchmarks remain limited in scale and often show weak correlation with human perceptual judgments. In this work, we introduce TIEdit, a benchmark for systematic evaluation of text-guided image editing methods. TIEdit consists of 512 source images paired with editing prompts across eight representative editing tasks, producing 5,120 edited images generated by ten state-of-the-art TIE models. To obtain reliable subjective ratings, 20 experts are recruited to produce 307,200 raw subjective ratings, which accumulates into 15,360 mean opinion scores (MOSs) across three evaluation dimensions: perceptual quality, editing alignment, and content preservation. Beyond the benchmark itself, we further propose EditProbe, an LLM-based evaluator that estimates editing quality via intermediate-layer probing of hidden representations. Instead of relying solely on final model outputs, EditProbe extracts informative representations from intermediate layers of multimodal large language models to better capture semantic and perceptual relationships between source images, editing instructions, and edited results. Experimental results demonstrate that widely used automatic evaluation metrics show limited correlation with human judgments on editing tasks, while EditProbe achieves substantially stronger alignment with human perception. Together, TIEdit and EditProbe provide a foundation for more reliable and perceptually aligned evaluation of text-guided image editing methods.

EditHF-1M: A Million-Scale Rich Human Preference Feedback for Image Editing

Recent text-guided image editing (TIE) models have achieved remarkable progress, while many edited images still suffer from issues such as artifacts, unexpected editings, unaesthetic contents. Although some benchmarks and methods have been proposed for evaluating edited images, scalable evaluation models are still lacking, which limits the development of human feedback reward models for image editing. To address the challenges, we first introduce \textbf{EditHF-1M}, a million-scale image editing dataset with over 29M human preference pairs and 148K human mean opinion ratings, both evaluated from three dimensions, \textit{i.e.}, visual quality, instruction alignment, and attribute preservation. Based on EditHF-1M, we propose \textbf{EditHF}, a multimodal large language model (MLLM) based evaluation model, to provide human-aligned feedback from image editing. Finally, we introduce \textbf{EditHF-Reward}, which utilizes EditHF as the reward signal to optimize the text-guided image editing models through reinforcement learning. Extensive experiments show that EditHF achieves superior alignment with human preferences and demonstrates strong generalization on other datasets. Furthermore, we fine-tune the Qwen-Image-Edit using EditHF-Reward, achieving significant performance improvements, which demonstrates the ability of EditHF to serve as a reward model to scale-up the image editing. Both the dataset and code will be released in our GitHub repository: https://github.com/IntMeGroup/EditHF.

Learning to Wander: Improving the Global Image Geolocation Ability of LMMs via Actionable Reasoning

Geolocation, the task of identifying the geographic location of an image, requires abundant world knowledge and complex reasoning abilities. Though advanced large multimodal models (LMMs) have shown superior aforementioned capabilities, their performance on the geolocation task remains unexplored. To this end, we introduce \textbf{WanderBench}, the first open access global geolocation benchmark designed for actionable geolocation reasoning in embodied scenarios. WanderBench contains over 32K panoramas across six continents, organized as navigable graphs that enable physical actions such as rotation and movement, transforming geolocation from static recognition into interactive exploration. Building on this foundation, we propose \textbf{GeoAoT} (Action of Thought), a \underline{Geo}location framework with \underline{A}ction of \underline{T}hough, which couples reasoning with embodied actions. Instead of generating textual reasoning chains, GeoAoT produces actionable plans such as, approaching landmarks or adjusting viewpoints, to actively reduce uncertainty. We further establish an evaluation protocol that jointly measures geolocation accuracy and difficulty-aware geolocation questioning ability. Experiments on 19 large multimodal models show that GeoAoT achieves superior fine-grained localization and stronger generalization in dynamic environments. WanderBench and GeoAoT define a new paradigm for actionable, reasoning driven geolocation in embodied visual understanding.

LifeEval: A Multimodal Benchmark for Assistive AI in Egocentric Daily Life Tasks

The rapid progress of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) marks a significant step toward artificial general intelligence, offering great potential for augmenting human capabilities. However, their ability to provide effective assistance in dynamic, real-world environments remains largely underexplored. Existing video benchmarks predominantly assess passive understanding through retrospective analysis or isolated perception tasks, failing to capture the interactive and adaptive nature of real-time user assistance. To bridge this gap, we introduce LifeEval, a multimodal benchmark designed to evaluate real-time, task-oriented human-AI collaboration in daily life from an egocentric perspective. LifeEval emphasizes three key aspects: task-oriented holistic evaluation, egocentric real-time perception from continuous first-person streams, and human-assistant collaborative interaction through natural dialogues. Constructed via a rigorous annotation pipeline, the benchmark comprises 4,075 high-quality question-answer pairs across 6 core capability dimensions. Extensive evaluations of 26 state-of-the-art MLLMs on LifeEval reveal substantial challenges in achieving timely, effective and adaptive interaction, highlighting essential directions for advancing human-centered interactive intelligence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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