Of Chains and Gains: What Reinforcement Learning changes on Reasoning-based Image Quality Assessment

Abstract

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has improved the performance of large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) on image quality assessment (IQA). Existing approaches often attribute these gains to improved reasoning before scoring, supported by increasingly plausible Chain-of-Thought (CoT). However, whether these gains exceed sampling effects and how they depend on explicit reasoning remain unclear. We rigorously investigate these questions through sampling-aware evaluation, controlled reasoning interventions, and shortcut experiments. We find that RL-trained models outperform base models under large-budget $\operatorname{max}_g@k$ evaluation, while improvements beyond averaging are concentrated in-distribution. RLVR produces chains that raise base-model performance when transplanted and improves scoring with the chain held fixed. Yet scoring becomes less dependent on the chain during inference, more clearly at 7B than at 32B. Steering the probed quality direction in thinking tokens also has little effect on scoring. Finally, RL can improve scoring accuracy by exploiting textual cues correlated with mean opinion scores (MOSs), which could inflate benchmark performance. Together, these findings show that RLVR raises quality scoring and produces more useful chains, but that better scoring does not imply a stronger reliance on explicit reasoning, while score-based rewards can also encourage reliance on quality-irrelevant shortcuts. We hope this preliminary study can enlighten more and more concrete reasoning schemes in IQA.