VQualA 2025 Challenge on Visual Quality Comparison for Large Multimodal Models: Methods and Results

This paper presents a summary of the VQualA 2025 Challenge on Visual Quality Comparison for Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), hosted as part of the ICCV 2025 Work-shop on Visual Quality Assessment. The challenge aims to evaluate and enhance the ability of state-of-the-art LMMs to perform open-ended and detailed reasoning about visual quality differences across multiple images. To this end, the competition introduces a novel benchmark comprising thousands of coarse-to-fine grained visual quality comparison tasks, spanning single images, pairs, and multi-image groups. Each task requires models to provide accurate quality judgments. The competition emphasizes holistic evaluation protocols, including 2AFC-based binary preference and multi-choice questions (MCQs). Around 100 participants submitted entries, with five models demonstrating the emerging capabilities of instruction-tuned LMMs on quality assessment. This challenge marks a significant step toward open-domain visual quality reasoning and comparison and serves as a catalyst for future research on inter-pretable and human-aligned quality evaluation systems.