Comparison Drives Preference: Reference-Aware Modeling for AI-Generated Video Quality Assessment
Authors: Minghao Zou, Gen Liu, Guanghui Yue, Baoquan Zhao, Zhihua Wang, Paul L. Rosin, Hantao Liu, Wei Zhou
Organizations: Cardiff University Cardiff, UK · Shandong University of Science and Technology Qingdao, China · Shenzhen University Shenzhen, China · Sun Yat-sen University Guangzhou, China · City University of Hong Kong Hong Kong, China
The rapid advancement of generative models has led to a growing volume of AI-generated videos, making the automatic quality assessment of such videos increasingly important. Existing AI-generated content video quality assessment (AIGC-VQA) methods typically estimate visual quality by analyzing each video independently, ignoring potential relationships among videos. In this work, we revisit AIGC-VQA from an inter-video perspective and formulate it as a reference-aware evaluation problem. Through this formulation, quality assessment is guided not only by intrinsic video characteristics but also by comparisons with related videos, which is more consistent with human perception. To validate its effectiveness, we propose Reference-aware Video Quality Assessment (RefVQA), which utilizes a query-centered reference graph to organize semantically related samples and performs graph-guided difference aggregation from the reference nodes to the query node. Experiments on existing datasets demonstrate that our proposed RefVQA outperforms state-of-the-art methods across multiple quality dimensions, with strong generalization ability validated by cross-dataset evaluation. These results highlight the effectiveness of the proposed reference-based formulation and suggest its potential to advance AIGC-VQA.
Recently, AI-driven video generation has attracted considerable attention. This surge increases the demand for reliable video quality assessment (VQA) metrics to evaluate AI-generated content (AIGC) videos and guide model optimization. Existing studies assess video quality through visual harmony, video-text consistency, and domain-specific alignment, yet lack quantitative metrics for measuring fidelity to physical laws. To address this limitation, we present a novel benchmark that evaluates the quality of AIGC videos based on their compliance with physical principles by quantitatively measuring geometric consistency across frames extracted from generated sequences. This serves as a proxy for estimating the extent to which generated videos conform to real-world physical rules. Specifically, GeoCon-Bench captures global motion through translation estimation, fits homography or fundamental matrix models using background correspondences, and reports complementary metrics, including inlier ratio and geometric error. We also release a dataset containing 20 scenes across six motion categories. Experiments on state-of-the-art AIGC models demonstrate the reliability of GeoCon-Bench as a video quality assessment metric.
AI-generated human-centric videos play a crucial role in a wide range of modern applications. However, they often suffer from quality issues and semantic mismatches, underscoring the importance of effective quality assessment for such videos. To this end, we extend our previous dataset HVEval with pairwise preference annotations, resulting in HVEval+, the largest holistic quality assessment dataset for AI-generated human-centric videos, which comprises 1k prompts based on a comprehensive taxonomy, 20k videos generated by 24 text-to-video (T2V) models, and extensive human annotations, including 60k mean opinion scores (MOSs) and 60k preference pairs across 3 dimensions (i.e., spatial quality, temporal quality, and text-video correspondence), as well as 20k category-specific question-answer (Q&A) pairs. Along with the HVEval+ dataset, we further propose MoE-Rater, a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE)-inspired and multimodal large language model (MLLM)-based all-in-one method that supports multi-dimensional quality rating, multi-dimensional pairwise comparison, and category-specific question answering within a single model. Specifically, we introduce Mixture of Projector Experts (MoPE) and Mixture of LoRA Experts (MoLE), together with a three-stage training strategy consisting of task-aware pre-training, task-specific adaptation, and adaptive routing optimization, to effectively unify multiple tasks, resulting in superior performance on both HVEval+ and Human-AGVQA datasets. Extensive experiments and comprehensive analysis demonstrate the significant potential of the HVEval+ dataset and the MoE-Rater method in advancing AI-generated video quality assessment and further facilitating the evaluation and optimization of T2V models.
Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have shown promise for video quality assessment, but most methods still predict an absolute score for each video. Such pointwise supervision often mixes perceptual quality with dataset-specific calibration, including annotation protocols, rating habits, and score distributions. As a result, the learned scoring rule may work well within a benchmark but transfer poorly across unseen domains. We argue that relative comparisons alleviate the absolute-scale calibration bias by focusing purely on perceptual differences rather than dataset-specific rating habits. Consequently, we propose \textbf{VersusQ}, a pairwise margin reasoning framework driven entirely by direct comparisons. Specifically, VersusQ performs LMM-based comparison between two videos, reasons about their visual and temporal quality differences, and predicts a signed continuous margin that captures both the preferred choice and the degree of difference. Furthermore, to align interpretable comparison rationales with fine-grained numerical differences, we introduce Margin-Coupled GRPO, which jointly optimizes rollout-based relational reasoning and continuous margin regression. Extensive experiments on multiple public VQA benchmarks demonstrate that VersusQ achieves state-of-the-art performance, strong cross-domain generalization, and reliable fine-grained ranking under heterogeneous evaluation scenarios.