Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and the abundance of food data have resulted in studies to improve food understanding using LLMs. Despite several recommendation systems utilizing LLMs and Knowledge Graphs (KGs), there has been limited research on integrating food related KGs with LLMs. We introduce KERL, a unified system that leverages food KGs and LLMs to provide personalized food recommendations and generates recipes with associated micro-nutritional information. Given a natural language question, KERL extracts entities, retrieves subgraphs from the KG, which are then fed into the LLM as context to select the recipes that satisfy the constraints. Next, our system generates the cooking steps and nutritional information for each recipe. To evaluate our approach, we also develop a benchmark dataset by curating recipe related questions, combined with constraints and personal preferences. Through extensive experiments, we show that our proposed KG-augmented LLM significantly outperforms existing approaches, offering a complete and coherent solution for food recommendation, recipe generation, and nutritional analysis. Our code and benchmark datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/mohbattharani/KERL.
The prevalence of unhealthy eating habits has become an increasingly concerning issue in the United States. However, major food recommendation platforms (e.g., Yelp) continue to prioritize users' dietary preferences over the healthiness of their choices. Although efforts have been made to develop health-aware food recommendation systems, the personalization of such systems based on users' specific health conditions remains under-explored. In addition, few research focus on the interpretability of these systems, which hinders users from assessing the reliability of recommendations and impedes the practical deployment of these systems. In response to this gap, we first establish two large-scale personalized health-aware food recommendation benchmarks at the first attempt. We then develop a novel framework, Multi-Objective Personalized Interpretable Health-aware Food Recommendation System (MOPI-HFRS), which provides food recommendations by jointly optimizing the three objectives: user preference, personalized healthiness and nutritional diversity, along with an large language model (LLM)-enhanced reasoning module to promote healthy dietary knowledge through the interpretation of recommended results. Specifically, this holistic graph learning framework first utilizes two structure learning and a structure pooling modules to leverage both descriptive features and health data. Then it employs Pareto optimization to achieve designed multi-facet objectives. Finally, to further promote the healthy dietary knowledge and awareness, we exploit an LLM by utilizing knowledge-infusion, prompting the LLMs with knowledge obtained from the recommendation model for interpretation.
Food detection is becoming a fundamental task in food computing that supports various multimedia applications, including food recommendation and dietary monitoring. To deal with real-world scenarios, food detection needs to localize and recognize novel food objects that are not seen during training, demanding Zero-Shot Detection (ZSD). However, the complexity of semantic attributes and intra-class feature diversity poses challenges for ZSD methods in distinguishing fine-grained food classes. To tackle this, we propose the Semantic Separable Diffusion Synthesizer (SeeDS) framework for Zero-Shot Food Detection (ZSFD). SeeDS consists of two modules: a Semantic Separable Synthesizing Module (S$^3$M) and a Region Feature Denoising Diffusion Model (RFDDM). The S$^3$M learns the disentangled semantic representation for complex food attributes from ingredients and cuisines, and synthesizes discriminative food features via enhanced semantic information. The RFDDM utilizes a novel diffusion model to generate diversified region features and enhances ZSFD via fine-grained synthesized features. Extensive experiments show the state-of-the-art ZSFD performance of our proposed method on two food datasets, ZSFooD and UECFOOD-256. Moreover, SeeDS also maintains effectiveness on general ZSD datasets, PASCAL VOC and MS COCO. The code and dataset can be found at https://github.com/LanceZPF/SeeDS.
Gaining insights into the preferences of new users and subsequently personalizing recommendations necessitate managing user interactions intelligently, namely, posing pertinent questions to elicit valuable information effectively. In this study, our focus is on a specific scenario of the cold-start problem, where the recommendation system lacks adequate user presence or access to other users' data is restricted, obstructing employing user profiling methods utilizing existing data in the system. We employ Active Learning (AL) to solve the addressed problem with the objective of maximizing information acquisition with minimal user effort. AL operates for selecting informative data from a large unlabeled set to inquire an oracle to label them and eventually updating a machine learning (ML) model. We operate AL in an integrated process of unsupervised, semi-supervised, and supervised ML within an explanatory preference elicitation process. It harvests user feedback (given for the system's explanations on the presented items) over informative samples to update an underlying ML model estimating user preferences. The designed user interaction facilitates personalizing the system by incorporating user feedback into the ML model and also enhances user trust by refining the system's explanations on recommendations. We implement the proposed preference elicitation methodology for food recommendation. We conducted human experiments to assess its efficacy in the short term and also experimented with several AL strategies over synthetic user profiles that we created for two food datasets, aiming for long-term performance analysis. The experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed preference elicitation with limited user-labeled data while also enhancing user trust through accurate explanations.
As people become more aware of their food choices, food computation models have become increasingly popular in assisting people in maintaining healthy eating habits. For example, food recommendation systems analyze recipe instructions to assess nutritional contents and provide recipe recommendations. The recent and remarkable successes of generative AI methods, such as auto-regressive large language models, can lead to robust methods for a more comprehensive understanding of recipes for healthy food recommendations beyond surface-level nutrition content assessments. In this study, we explore the use of generative AI methods to extend current food computation models, primarily involving the analysis of nutrition and ingredients, to also incorporate cooking actions (e.g., add salt, fry the meat, boil the vegetables, etc.). Cooking actions are notoriously hard to model using statistical learning methods due to irregular data patterns - significantly varying natural language descriptions for the same action (e.g., marinate the meat vs. marinate the meat and leave overnight) and infrequently occurring patterns (e.g., add salt occurs far more frequently than marinating the meat). The prototypical approach to handling irregular data patterns is to increase the volume of data that the model ingests by orders of magnitude. Unfortunately, in the cooking domain, these problems are further compounded with larger data volumes presenting a unique challenge that is not easily handled by simply scaling up. In this work, we propose novel aggregation-based generative AI methods, Cook-Gen, that reliably generate cooking actions from recipes, despite difficulties with irregular data patterns, while also outperforming Large Language Models and other strong baselines.
Food logo detection plays an important role in the multimedia for its wide real-world applications, such as food recommendation of the self-service shop and infringement detection on e-commerce platforms. A large-scale food logo dataset is urgently needed for developing advanced food logo detection algorithms. However, there are no available food logo datasets with food brand information. To support efforts towards food logo detection, we introduce the dataset FoodLogoDet-1500, a new large-scale publicly available food logo dataset, which has 1,500 categories, about 100,000 images and about 150,000 manually annotated food logo objects. We describe the collection and annotation process of FoodLogoDet-1500, analyze its scale and diversity, and compare it with other logo datasets. To the best of our knowledge, FoodLogoDet-1500 is the first largest publicly available high-quality dataset for food logo detection. The challenge of food logo detection lies in the large-scale categories and similarities between food logo categories. For that, we propose a novel food logo detection method Multi-scale Feature Decoupling Network (MFDNet), which decouples classification and regression into two branches and focuses on the classification branch to solve the problem of distinguishing multiple food logo categories. Specifically, we introduce the feature offset module, which utilizes the deformation-learning for optimal classification offset and can effectively obtain the most representative features of classification in detection. In addition, we adopt a balanced feature pyramid in MFDNet, which pays attention to global information, balances the multi-scale feature maps, and enhances feature extraction capability. Comprehensive experiments on FoodLogoDet-1500 and other two benchmark logo datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The FoodLogoDet-1500 can be found at this https URL.
Food recommendation has become an important means to help guide users to adopt healthy dietary habits. Previous works on food recommendation either i) fail to consider users' explicit requirements, ii) ignore crucial health factors (e.g., allergies and nutrition needs), or iii) do not utilize the rich food knowledge for recommending healthy recipes. To address these limitations, we propose a novel problem formulation for food recommendation, modeling this task as constrained question answering over a large-scale food knowledge base/graph (KBQA). Besides the requirements from the user query, personalized requirements from the user's dietary preferences and health guidelines are handled in a unified way as additional constraints to the QA system. To validate this idea, we create a QA style dataset for personalized food recommendation based on a large-scale food knowledge graph and health guidelines. Furthermore, we propose a KBQA-based personalized food recommendation framework which is equipped with novel techniques for handling negations and numerical comparisons in the queries. Experimental results on the benchmark show that our approach significantly outperforms non-personalized counterparts (average 59.7% absolute improvement across various evaluation metrics), and is able to recommend more relevant and healthier recipes.
With the rising incidence of some diseases, such as obesity and diabetes, a healthy diet is arousing increasing attention. However, most existing food-related research efforts focus on recipe retrieval, user preference-based food recommendation, cooking assistance, or the nutrition and calorie estimation of dishes, ignoring the personalized health-aware food recommendation. Therefore, in this work, we present a personalized health-aware food recommendation scheme, namely Market2Dish, mapping the ingredients displayed in the market to the healthy dishes eaten at home. The proposed scheme comprises three components, namely recipe retrieval, user-health profiling, and health-aware food recommendation. In particular, recipe retrieval aims to acquire the ingredients available to the users, and then retrieve recipe candidates from a large-scale recipe dataset. User health profiling is to characterize the health conditions of users by capturing the textual health-related information crawled from social networks. Specifically, to solve the issue that the health-related information is extremely sparse, we incorporate a word-class interaction mechanism into the proposed deep model to learn the fine-grained correlations between the textual tweets and pre-defined health concepts. For the health-aware food recommendation, we present a novel category-aware hierarchical memory network-based recommender to learn the health-aware user-recipe interactions for better food recommendation. Moreover, extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the health-aware food recommendation scheme.