LLaVA-Assessor: Building the Foundation LMM For Visual Quality Assessment

Aligning with the human visual system (HVS) in perceiving and evaluating the quality of visual signals is a central objective of machine-vision-based visual quality assessment systems. With the rapid progress of large multi-modal models (LMMs), visual question answering provides a promising paradigm for building unified foundation models for visual quality assessment under multi-modal and multi-task scenarios. Inspired by the classical ``perception-decision" process in HVS-based quality evaluation, we formulate visual quality assessment for LMM-based machine vision as two complementary tasks: ``quality interpretation'' and ``quality scoring". Centered on these objectives, we propose LLaVA-Assessor, a unified data construction and model training system. To support multi-modal inputs, we design an adaptive model architecture that enables efficient processing of both images and videos. For data construction, we develop rigorous human annotation protocols and a novel machine-synthesis-dominated data expansion pipeline to build a large-scale and high-quality datasets. Furthermore, we introduce a simple yet effective prompt disentanglement strategy to alleviate training-objective confusion in multi-task learning, thereby enabling stable and coherent joint training. The resulting all-in-one LMM LLaVA-Assessor-GIGA achieves superior performance on 11 image/video quality scoring test sets and 4 visual quality interpretation benchmarks. Extensive results demonstrate the effectiveness of integrating structured data construction, adaptive model design, and multi-task joint training for automated visual quality assessment. Our work provides compelling insights for developing foundation LMMs for automatic visual quality assessment. Project page at https://github.com/jzhws/LLaVA-Assessor.