Dual-Pathway Wavelet-Attention Framework for Image-Only AI-Generated Image Quality Assessment

AI-generated images (AIGIs) often contain perceptual defects that differ from the distortions commonly studied in conventional no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA). This work investigates image-only AIGC image quality assessment, where no prompt text is used and the quality score must be inferred from visual evidence such as artifacts, structure, and semantic plausibility. We propose a dual-pathway wavelet-attention framework built on a Swin Transformer V2-Base backbone. The artifact pathway employs a Noise Perceptive Attention Module (NPAM) with fixed Haar wavelet decomposition to describe generation-related sub-band degradation cues, whereas the image-perception pathway models semantic, structural, and contextual quality evidence using multi-scale attention, global–local spatial-channel attention, and pyramid pooling. The two pathways are integrated through adaptive fusion and a spatially weighted regression head with an auxiliary global prediction. Experiments on AGIQA-1K, AGIQA-3K, and AIGCIQA2023 demonstrate competitive in-domain performance, including SRCC values of 0.8418 on AGIQA-3K and 0.8445 on the quality dimension of AIGCIQA2023. The evaluation further covers individual module ablations, score-fusion variants, seed stability, qualitative error analysis, and cross-database transfer, revealing both the contribution of the proposed components and the remaining difficulty of source-disjoint generalization.