arXiv subjects

Liangchao Yao

Publications and source records attributed to Liangchao Yao.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

iDiff: Interpretable Difference-aware Framework for Pairwise Image Quality Assessment

Pairwise image quality assessment (IQA) in professional photography requires a model not only to identify the preferred image between two candidates, but also to provide convincing and image-grounded reasoning. In the NTIRE 2026 RAIM challenge, this requirement is further emphasized by jointly evaluating preference prediction and rationale generation. To address this task, we propose iDiff, an Interpretable Difference-aware framework for pairwise image quality assessment. Our method adopts a dual-branch design consisting of an Answer Model and a Thinking Model. The Answer Model performs robust preference prediction by explicitly decomposing each sample into left/right global and local views, followed by content-aware specialization for person and scene images and ensemble-based aggregation across backbones. The Thinking Model focuses on rationale generation and is progressively enhanced with expert-style templates, multi-source quality features, and answer-aware supervision conditioned on the Answer Model prediction. In this way, iDiff jointly models discriminative decision making and structured explanation, improving both robustness and interpretability. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework on both accuracy and reasoning-quality metrics. Our method achieved first place in the NTIRE 2026 RAIM challenge, showing the effectiveness of integrating explicit difference modeling with structured multimodal reasoning for pairwise IQA.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

From User Interface to Agent Interface: Efficiency Optimization of UI Representations for LLM Agents

While Large Language Model (LLM) agents show great potential for automated UI navigation such as automated UI testing and AI assistants, their efficiency has been largely overlooked. Our motivating study reveals that inefficient UI representation creates a critical performance bottleneck. However, UI representation optimization, formulated as the task of automatically generating programs that transform UI representations, faces two unique challenges. First, the lack of Boolean oracles, which traditional program synthesis uses to decisively validate semantic correctness, poses a fundamental challenge to co-optimization of token efficiency and completeness. Second, the need to process large, complex UI trees as input while generating long, compositional transformation programs, making the search space vast and error-prone. Toward addressing the preceding limitations, we present UIFormer, the first automated optimization framework that synthesizes UI transformation programs by conducting constraint-based optimization with structured decomposition of the complex synthesis task. First, UIFormer restricts the program space using a domain-specific language (DSL) that captures UI-specific operations. Second, UIFormer conducts LLM-based iterative refinement with correctness and efficiency rewards, providing guidance for achieving the efficiency-completeness co-optimization. UIFormer operates as a lightweight plugin that applies transformation programs for seamless integration with existing LLM agents, requiring minimal modifications to their core logic. Evaluations across three UI navigation benchmarks spanning Android and Web platforms with five LLMs demonstrate that UIFormer achieves 48.7% to 55.8% token reduction with minimal runtime overhead while maintaining or improving agent performance. Real-world industry deployment at WeChat further validates the practical impact of UIFormer.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

iDETEX: Empowering MLLMs for Intelligent DETailed EXplainable IQA

Image Quality Assessment (IQA) has progressed from scalar quality prediction to more interpretable, human-aligned evaluation paradigms. In this work, we address the emerging challenge of detailed and explainable IQA by proposing iDETEX-a unified multimodal large language model (MLLM) capable of simultaneously performing three key tasks: quality grounding, perception, and description. To facilitate efficient and generalizable training across these heterogeneous subtasks, we design a suite of task-specific offline augmentation modules and a data mixing strategy. These are further complemented by online enhancement strategies to fully exploit multi-sourced supervision. We validate our approach on the large-scale ViDA-UGC benchmark, where iDETEX achieves state-of-the-art performance across all subtasks. Our model ranks first in the ICCV MIPI 2025 Detailed Image Quality Assessment Challenge, demonstrating its effectiveness and robustness in delivering accurate and interpretable quality assessments.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Instruction-augmented Multimodal Alignment for Image-Text and Element Matching

With the rapid advancement of text-to-image (T2I) generation models, assessing the semantic alignment between generated images and text descriptions has become a significant research challenge. Current methods, including those based on Visual Question Answering (VQA), still struggle with fine-grained assessments and precise quantification of image-text alignment. This paper presents an improved evaluation method named Instruction-augmented Multimodal Alignment for Image-Text and Element Matching (iMatch), which evaluates image-text semantic alignment by fine-tuning multimodal large language models. We introduce four innovative augmentation strategies: First, the QAlign strategy creates a precise probabilistic mapping to convert discrete scores from multimodal large language models into continuous matching scores. Second, a validation set augmentation strategy uses pseudo-labels from model predictions to expand training data, boosting the model's generalization performance. Third, an element augmentation strategy integrates element category labels to refine the model's understanding of image-text matching. Fourth, an image augmentation strategy employs techniques like random lighting to increase the model's robustness. Additionally, we propose prompt type augmentation and score perturbation strategies to further enhance the accuracy of element assessments. Our experimental results show that the iMatch method significantly surpasses existing methods, confirming its effectiveness and practical value. Furthermore, our iMatch won first place in the CVPR NTIRE 2025 Text to Image Generation Model Quality Assessment - Track 1 Image-Text Alignment.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Beyond Pass or Fail: Multi-Dimensional Benchmarking of Foundation Models for Goal-based Mobile UI Navigation

Recent advances of foundation models (FMs) have made navigating mobile applications (apps) based on high-level goal instructions within reach, with significant industrial applications such as UI testing. While existing benchmarks evaluate FM-based UI navigation using the binary pass/fail metric, they have two major limitations: they cannot reflect the complex nature of mobile UI navigation where FMs may fail for various reasons (e.g., misunderstanding instructions and failed planning), and they lack industrial relevance due to oversimplified tasks that poorly represent real-world scenarios. To address the preceding limitations, we propose Sphinx, a comprehensive benchmark for multi-dimensional evaluation of FMs in industrial settings of UI navigation. Sphinx introduces a specialized toolkit that evaluates five essential FM capabilities, providing detailed insights into failure modes such as insufficient app knowledge or planning issues. Using both popular Google Play applications and WeChat's internal UI test cases, we evaluate 8 FMs with 20 different configurations. Our results show that existing FMs universally struggle with goal-based testing tasks, primarily due to insufficient UI-specific capabilities. We summarize seven lessons learned from benchmarking FMs with Sphinx, providing clear directions for improving FM-based mobile UI navigation.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

Revisiting Video Quality Assessment from the Perspective of Generalization

The increasing popularity of short video platforms such as YouTube Shorts, TikTok, and Kwai has led to a surge in User-Generated Content (UGC), which presents significant challenges for the generalization performance of Video Quality Assessment (VQA) tasks. These challenges not only affect performance on test sets but also impact the ability to generalize across different datasets. While prior research has primarily focused on enhancing feature extractors, sampling methods, and network branches, it has largely overlooked the generalization capabilities of VQA tasks. In this work, we reevaluate the VQA task from a generalization standpoint. We begin by analyzing the weight loss landscape of VQA models, identifying a strong correlation between this landscape and the generalization gaps. We then investigate various techniques to regularize the weight loss landscape. Our results reveal that adversarial weight perturbations can effectively smooth this landscape, significantly improving the generalization performance, with cross-dataset generalization and fine-tuning performance enhanced by up to 1.8% and 3%, respectively. Through extensive experiments across various VQA methods and datasets, we validate the effectiveness of our approach. Furthermore, by leveraging our insights, we achieve state-of-the-art performance in Image Quality Assessment (IQA) tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/XinliYue/VQA-Generalization.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Advancing Video Quality Assessment for AIGC

In recent years, AI generative models have made remarkable progress across various domains, including text generation, image generation, and video generation. However, assessing the quality of text-to-video generation is still in its infancy, and existing evaluation frameworks fall short when compared to those for natural videos. Current video quality assessment (VQA) methods primarily focus on evaluating the overall quality of natural videos and fail to adequately account for the substantial quality discrepancies between frames in generated videos. To address this issue, we propose a novel loss function that combines mean absolute error with cross-entropy loss to mitigate inter-frame quality inconsistencies. Additionally, we introduce the innovative S2CNet technique to retain critical content, while leveraging adversarial training to enhance the model's generalization capabilities. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing VQA techniques on the AIGC Video dataset, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art by 3.1% in terms of PLCC.

cs.CV↗