Remember and Reuse: Cross-Task Blind Image Quality Assessment via Relevance-aware Incremental Learning

Existing blind image quality assessment (BIQA) methods have made great progress in various task-specific applications, including the synthetic, authentic, or over-enhanced distortion evaluations. However, limited by the static model and once-for-all learning strategy, they failed to perform the cross-task evaluations in many practical applications, where diverse evaluation criteria and distortion types are constantly emerging. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a dynamic Remember and Reuse (R&R) network, which efficiently performs the cross-task BIQA based on a novel relevance-aware incremental learning strategy. Given multiple evaluation tasks across different distortion types or databases, our R&R network sequentially updates the parameters for every task one by one. After each update step, part of task-specific parameters is settled, which ensures R&R Remembers their dedicated evaluation preferences. The remaining parameters are pruned for the dynamic usage of the subsequent tasks. To further exploit the correlation between different tasks, we feed the training data of a new task to previously settled parameters. Better prediction accuracy is considered as higher task relevance and vice versa. Then, we selectively Reuse parts of previously settled parameters, whose proportion is adaptively determined by the task relevance. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method efficiently achieves the cross-task BIQA without catastrophic forgetting, and significantly outperforms many state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/maruiperfect/R-R-Net.