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

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03558v1
• Date: Tue, 03 Feb 2026 14:04:51 GMT
• Title: ELIQ: A Label-Free Framework for Quality Assessment of Evolving AI-Generated Images
• Authors: Xinyue Li, Zhiming Xu, Zhichao Zhang, Zhaolin Cai, Sijing Wu, Xiongkuo Min, Yitong Chen, Guangtao Zhai,
• Abstract summary: We present ELIQ, a Label-free Framework for Quality Assessment of Evolving AI-generated Images.<n>Specifically, ELIQ focuses on visual quality and prompt-image alignment.<n>It automatically constructs positive and aspect-specific negative pairs to cover both conventional distortions and AIGC-specific distortion modes.
• Score: 76.5101823186747
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: 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.

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