DL model to assess quality of image
I found the answer I was looking for in this Google paper:

However, in the case of ordered-classes (e.g.
aesthetic and quality estimation), cross-entropy loss lacks the
inter-class relationships between score buckets. One might
argue that ordered-classes can be represented by a real number, and consequently, can be learned through a regression
framework. Yet, it has been shown that for ordered classes,
the classification frameworks can outperform regression models [21], [31]. Hou et al. [21] show that training on datasets
with intrinsic ordering between classes can benefit from EMDbased losses. These loss functions penalize mis-classifications according to class distances