2025/05/31 by Shreshth Saini, Ru-Ling Liao, Saini, Shreshth +5 · 1 citation
Computer Science · Engineering · #3D Shape Modeling and Analysis #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Computer Graphics and Visualization Techniques #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Neural Networks and Applications
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2506.00327
openalex publication_date 2025/05/31 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Despite recent advancements in latent diffusion models that generate high-dimensional image data and perform various downstream tasks, there has been little exploration into perceptual consistency within these models on the task of No-Reference Image Quality Assessment (NR-IQA). In this paper, we hypothesize that latent diffusion models implicitly exhibit perceptually consistent local regions within the data manifold. We leverage this insight to guide on-manifold sampling using perceptual features and input measurements. Specifically, we propose Perceptual Manifold Guidance (PMG), an algorithm that utilizes pretrained latent diffusion models and perceptual quality features to obtain perceptually consistent multi-scale and multi-timestep feature maps from the denoising U-Net. We empirically demonstrate that these hyperfeatures exhibit high correlation with human perception in IQA tasks. Our method can be applied to any existing pretrained latent diffusion model and is straightforward to integrate. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first work on guiding diffusion model with perceptual features for NR-IQA. Extensive experiments on IQA datasets show that our method, LGDM, achieves state-of-the-art performance, underscoring the superior generalization capabilities of diffusion models for NR-IQA tasks.