One Model, Two Minds: Task-Conditioned Reasoning for Unified Image Quality and Aesthetic Assessment
Unifying Image Quality Assessment (IQA) and Image Aesthetic Assessment (IAA) in a single multimodal large language model is appealing, yet existing methods adopt a task-agnostic recipe that applies the same reasoning strategy and reward to both tasks. We show this is fundamentally misaligned: IQA relies on low-level, objective perceptual cues and benefits from concise distortion-focused reasoning, whereas IAA requires deliberative semantic judgment and is poorly served by point-wise score regression. We identify these as a reasoning mismatch and an optimization mismatch, and provide empirical evidence for both through controlled probes. Motivated by these findings, we propose TATAR (Task-...
| Authors | Wen Yin, Cencen Liu, Dingrui Liu et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 20 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 20 March 2026 |
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