{"paper":{"title":"HiRQA: Hierarchical Ranking and Quality Alignment for Opinion-Unaware Image Quality Assessment","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"cs.CV","authors_text":"Haining Wang, Md Jahidul Islam, Vaishnav Ramesh","submitted_at":"2025-08-20T23:48:21Z","abstract_excerpt":"Despite significant progress in no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA), dataset biases and reliance on subjective labels continue to hinder their generalization performance. We propose HiRQA (Hierarchical Ranking and Quality Alignment), a self-supervised, opinion-unaware framework that offers a hierarchical, quality-aware embedding through a combination of ranking and contrastive learning. Unlike prior approaches that depend on pristine references or auxiliary modalities at inference time, HiRQA predicts quality scores using only the input image. We introduce a novel higher-order ranki"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2508.15130","kind":"arxiv","version":2},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2508.15130/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}