Image quality assessment (IQA) aims to quantify the visual quality of digital images consistent with human perceptual judgments. Commonly, IQA models are classified into full-reference (FR) and noreference (NR) approaches [47], depending on the availability of pristine-quality reference images. In this paper, we focus on NR-IQA due to its practical relevance in real-world scenarios where reference images are unavailable. Over the decades, NR-IQA has evolved from knowledge-driven [33, 12] to data-driven approaches [30, 19, 54], and shifted from regression-based to ranking-based [58, 59] techniques. Nevertheless, achieving strong model generalization (e.g., generalization to unseen image distortions) remains a significant, unresolved challenge, driving recent research toward multi-dataset training [6], active fine-tuning [44], and continual model adaptation [57]. The rapid advancement of vision-language models (VLMs) offers promising avenues for enhancing NR-IQA generalization by contextualizing it into broader vision tasks [51]. VLMs can effectively integrate multi-modal information, enabling understanding of both low-level image distortions (e.g., noise and blur) and high-level perceptual attributes (e.g., aesthetics and content semantics). This multi-modal semantic contextualization allows VLMs to articulate nuanced quality descriptions with stronger generalization. However, current NR-IQA methods mainly leverage VLMs through supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which face several critical limitations [49, 56].

Image compression methods are usually optimized isolatedly for human perception or machine analysis tasks. We reveal fundamental commonalities between these objectives: preserving accurate semantic information is paramount, as it directly dictates the integrity of critical information for intelligent tasks and aids human understanding. Concurrently, enhanced perceptual quality not only improves visual appeal but also, by ensuring realistic image distributions, benefits semantic feature extraction for machine tasks. Based on this insight, we propose Diff-ICMH, a generative image compression framework aiming for harmonizing machine and human vision in image compression. It ensures perceptual realism by leveraging generative priors and simultaneously guarantees semantic fidelity through the incorporation of Semantic Consistency loss (SC loss) during training. Additionally, we introduce the Tag Guidance Module (TGM) that leverages highly semantic image-level tags to stimulate the pre-trained diffusion model's generative capabilities, requiring minimal additional bit rates. Consequently, Diff-ICMH supports multiple intelligent tasks through a single codec and bitstream without any task-specific adaptation, while preserving high-quality visual experience for human perception. Extensive experimental results demonstrate Diff-ICMH's superiority and generalizability across diverse tasks, while maintaining visual appeal for human perception.

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This paper studies a diffusion-based framework to address the low-light image enhancement problem.

While recent advancements in large multimodal models (LMMs) have significantly improved their abilities in image quality assessment (IQA) relying on absolute quality rating, how to transfer reliable relative quality comparison outputs to continuous perceptual quality scores remains largely unexplored.