Contrastive learning-based video quality assessment-jointed video vision transformer for video recognition

Short-form video poses new challenges to the quality assessment of user-generated content (UGC) due to its complex generation pipeline, rapid content variation, and mixed distortions. To address this challenge, we propose an end-to-end video quality assessment (VQA) framework that employs a dense visual encoder based on CLIP, and incorporates compression priors derived from the frequency domain to generate artifact- and structure-aware weight maps for feature aggregation. By explicitly decomposing artifact, structure, and original visual feature branches and adaptively fusing them over time through a learned gating module, the proposed method achieves accurate and efficient quality prediction. Experimental results show that our method achieves strong performance on short-form video datasets in terms of average rank and linear correlation (SRCC: 0.736, PLCC: 0.787), while maintaining efficient inference runtime. The code and additional results are available at: https://github.com/xinyiW915/FGSVQA.

Video Quality Assessment (VQA) is evolving beyond single-number mean opinion score toward richer, multi-faceted evaluations of video content. In this paper, we present a large-scale multi-dimensional VQA dataset UltraVQA that encompasses diverse User-Generated Content~(UGC) annotated across five key quality dimensions: Motion Quality, Motion Amplitude, Aesthetic Quality, Content Quality, and Clarity Quality. Each video in our dataset is scored by over 3 human raters on these dimensions, with fine-grained sub-attribute labels, and accompanied by an explanatory rationale generated by GPT based on the collective human judgments. To better leverage these rich annotations and improve discrete quality score assessment, we introduce Analytic Score Optimization (ASO), a theoretically grounded post-training objective derived for multi-dimensional VQA. By reframing quality assessment as a regularized decision-making process, we obtain a closed-form solution that naturally captures the ordinal nature of human ratings, ensuring alignment with human ranking preferences. In experiments, our method outperforms most baselines including closed-source APIs and open-source models, while also reducing mean absolute error (MAE) in quality prediction. Our work highlights the importance of multi-dimensional, interpretable annotations and reinforcement-based alignment in advancing video quality assessment.

Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown promising performance on video quality assessment (VQA) tasks. However, adapting them to new scenarios remains expensive due to large-scale retraining and costly mean opinion score (MOS) annotations. In this paper, we argue that a pretrained MLLM already provides a useful perceptual prior for VQA, and that the main challenge is to efficiently calibrate this prior to the target MOS space. Based on this insight, we propose DPC-VQA, a decoupling perception and calibration framework for video quality assessment. Specifically, DPC-VQA uses a frozen MLLM to provide a base quality estimate and perceptual prior, and employs a lightweight calibration branch to predict a residual correction for target-scenario adaptation. This design avoids costly end-to-end retraining while maintaining reliable performance with lower training and data costs. Extensive experiments on both user-generated content (UGC) and AI-generated content (AIGC) benchmarks show that DPC-VQA achieves competitive performance against representative baselines, while using less than 2% of the trainable parameters of conventional MLLM-based VQA methods and remaining effective with only 20% of MOS labels. The code will be released upon publication.