Structure-aware generation network for recipe generation from images

Sharing food has become very popular with the development of social media. For many real-world applications, people are keen to know the underlying recipes of a food item. In this paper, we are interested in automatically generating cooking instructions for food. We investigate an open research task of generating cooking instructions based on only food images and ingredients, which is similar to the image captioning task. However, compared with image captioning datasets, the target recipes are long-length paragraphs and do not have annotations on structure information. To address the above limitations, we propose a novel framework of Structure-aware Generation Network (SGN) to tackle the food recipe generation task. Our approach brings together several novel ideas in a systematic framework: (1) exploiting an unsupervised learning approach to obtain the sentence-level tree structure labels before training; (2) generating trees of target recipes from images with the supervision of tree structure labels learned from (1); and (3) integrating the inferred tree structures with the recipe generation procedure. Our proposed model can produce high-quality and coherent recipes, and achieve the state-of-the-art performance on the benchmark Recipe1M dataset.AI SingaporeAccepted versionThis research is supported, in part, by the National Research Foundation (NRF), Singapore under its AI Singapore Programme (AISG Award No: AISG-GC-2019-003) and under its NRF Investigatorship Programme (NRFI Award No. NRF-NRFI05-2019-0002). Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of National Research Foundation, Singapore. This research is also supported, in part, by the Singapore Ministry of Health under its National Innovation Challenge on Active and Confident Ageing (NIC Project No. MOH/NIC/COG04/2017 and MOH/NIC/HAIG03/2017), and the MOE Tier-1 research grants: RG28/18 (S) and RG22/19 (S)