Cook-Gen: Robust Generative Modeling of Cooking Actions from Recipes

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.

A Rich Recipe Representation as Plan to Support Expressive Multi Modal Queries on Recipe Content and Preparation Process

Food is not only a basic human necessity but also a key factor driving a society's health and economic well-being. As a result, the cooking domain is a popular use-case to demonstrate decision-support (AI) capabilities in service of benefits like precision health with tools ranging from information retrieval interfaces to task-oriented chatbots. An AI here should understand concepts in the food domain (e.g., recipes, ingredients), be tolerant to failures encountered while cooking (e.g., browning of butter), handle allergy-based substitutions, and work with multiple data modalities (e.g. text and images). However, the recipes today are handled as textual documents which makes it difficult for machines to read, reason and handle ambiguity. This demands a need for better representation of the recipes, overcoming the ambiguity and sparseness that exists in the current textual documents. In this paper, we discuss the construction of a machine-understandable rich recipe representation (R3), in the form of plans, from the recipes available in natural language. R3 is infused with additional knowledge such as information about allergens and images of ingredients, possible failures and tips for each atomic cooking step. To show the benefits of R3, we also present TREAT, a tool for recipe retrieval which uses R3 to perform multi-modal reasoning on the recipe's content (plan objects - ingredients and cooking tools), food preparation process (plan actions and time), and media type (image, text). R3 leads to improved retrieval efficiency and new capabilities that were hither-to not possible in textual representation.