Understanding food recipe requires anticipating the implicit causal effects of cooking actions, such that the recipe can be converted into a graph describing the temporal workflow of the recipe. This is a non-trivial task that involves common-sense reasoning. However, existing efforts rely on hand-crafted features to extract the workflow graph from recipes due to the lack of large-scale labeled datasets. Moreover, they fail to utilize the cooking images, which constitute an important part of food recipes. In this paper, we build MM-ReS, the first large-scale dataset for cooking workflow construction, consisting of 9,850 recipes with human-labeled workflow graphs. Cooking steps are multi-modal, featuring both text instructions and cooking images. We then propose a neural encoder-decoder model that utilizes both visual and textual information to construct the cooking workflow, which achieved over 20% performance gain over existing hand-crafted baselines.
@article{arxiv.2008.09151,
title = {Multi-modal Cooking Workflow Construction for Food Recipes},
author = {Liangming Pan and Jingjing Chen and Jianlong Wu and Shaoteng Liu and Chong-Wah Ngo and Min-Yen Kan and Yu-Gang Jiang and Tat-Seng Chua},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.09151},
year = {2020}
}