RECIPTOR: An Effective Pretrained Model for Recipe Representation Learning

Diya Li, Mohammed J. Zaki

Abstract: Recipe representation plays an important role in food computing for perception, recognition, recommendation and other applications. Learning pretrained recipe embeddings is a challenging task, as there is a lack of high quality annotated food datasets. In this paper, we provide a joint approach for learning effective pretrained recipe embeddings using both the ingredients and cooking instructions. We present RECIPTOR, a novel set transformer-based joint model to learn recipe representations, that preserves permutation-invariance for the ingredient set and uses a novel knowledge graph (KG) derived triplet sampling approach to optimize the learned embeddings so that related recipes are closer in the latent semantic space. The embeddings are further jointly optimized by combining similarity among cooking instructions with a KG based triplet loss. We experimentally show that RECIPTOR's recipe embeddings outperform state-of-the-art baselines on two newly designed downstream classification tasks by a wide margin.