Zoom-IQA: Image Quality Assessment with Reliable Region-Aware Reasoning

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02918v2
• Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2026 14:19:47 GMT
• Title: Zoom-IQA: Image Quality Assessment with Reliable Region-Aware Reasoning
• Authors: Guoqiang Liang, Jianyi Wang, Zhonghua Wu, Shangchen Zhou,
• Abstract summary: We introduce Zoom-IQA, a VLM-based IQA model to explicitly emulate key cognitive behaviors.<n>We show that Zoom-IQA achieves improved robustness, explainability, and generalization.<n>The application to downstream tasks, such as image restoration, further demonstrates the effectiveness of Zoom-IQA.
• Score: 32.30800226412995
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Image Quality Assessment (IQA) is a long-standing problem in computer vision. Previous methods typically focus on predicting numerical scores without explanation or providing low-level descriptions lacking precise scores. Recent reasoning-based vision language models (VLMs) have shown strong potential for IQA by jointly generating quality descriptions and scores. However, existing VLM-based IQA methods often suffer from unreliable reasoning due to their limited capability of integrating visual and textual cues. In this work, we introduce Zoom-IQA, a VLM-based IQA model to explicitly emulate key cognitive behaviors: uncertainty awareness, region reasoning, and iterative refinement. Specifically, we present a two-stage training pipeline: 1) supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on our Grounded-Rationale-IQA (GR-IQA) dataset to teach the model to ground its assessments in key regions, and 2) reinforcement learning (RL) for dynamic policy exploration, stabilized by our KL-Coverage regularizer to prevent reasoning and scoring diversity collapse, with a Progressive Re-sampling Strategy for mitigating annotation bias. Extensive experiments show that Zoom-IQA achieves improved robustness, explainability, and generalization. The application to downstream tasks, such as image restoration, further demonstrates the effectiveness of Zoom-IQA.

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