Daily Papers

This research proposes a new recommender system algorithm for online grocery shopping. The algorithm is based on the perspective that, since the grocery items are usually bought in bulk, a grocery recommender system should be capable of recommending the items in bulk. The algorithm figures out the possible dishes a user may cook based on the items added to the basket and recommends the ingredients accordingly. Our algorithm does not depend on the user ratings. Customers usually do not have the patience to rate the groceries they purchase. Therefore, algorithms that are not dependent on user ratings need to be designed. Instead of using a brute force search, this algorithm limits the search space to a set of only a few probably food categories. Each food category consists of several food subcategories. For example, "fried rice" and "biryani" are food subcategories that belong to the food category "rice". For each food category, items are ranked according to how well they can differentiate a food subcategory. To each food subcategory in the activated search space, this algorithm attaches a score. The score is calculated based on the rank of the items added to the basket. Once the score exceeds a threshold value, its corresponding subcategory gets activated. The algorithm then uses a basket-to-recipe similarity measure to identify the best recipe matches within the activated subcategories only. This reduces the search space to a great extent. We may argue that this algorithm is similar to the content-based recommender system in some sense, but it does not suffer from the limitations like limited content, over-specialization, or the new user problem.

Traditional cooking recipes follow a structure which can be modelled very well if the rules and semantics of the different sections of the recipe text are analyzed and represented accurately. We propose a structure that can accurately represent the recipe as well as a pipeline to infer the best representation of the recipe in this uniform structure. The Ingredients section in a recipe typically lists down the ingredients required and corresponding attributes such as quantity, temperature, and processing state. This can be modelled by defining these attributes and their values. The physical entities which make up a recipe can be broadly classified into utensils, ingredients and their combinations that are related by cooking techniques. The instruction section lists down a series of events in which a cooking technique or process is applied upon these utensils and ingredients. We model these relationships in the form of tuples. Thus, using a combination of these methods we model cooking recipe in the dataset RecipeDB to show the efficacy of our method. This mined information model can have several applications which include translating recipes between languages, determining similarity between recipes, generation of novel recipes and estimation of the nutritional profile of recipes. For the purpose of recognition of ingredient attributes, we train the Named Entity Relationship (NER) models and analyze the inferences with the help of K-Means clustering. Our model presented with an F1 score of 0.95 across all datasets. We use a similar NER tagging model for labelling cooking techniques (F1 score = 0.88) and utensils (F1 score = 0.90) within the instructions section. Finally, we determine the temporal sequence of relationships between ingredients, utensils and cooking techniques for modeling the instruction steps.

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.

"A common decision made by people, whether healthy or with health conditions, is choosing meals like breakfast, lunch, and dinner, comprising combinations of foods for appetizer, main course, side dishes, desserts, and beverages. Often, this decision involves tradeoffs between nutritious choices (e.g., salt and sugar levels, nutrition content) and convenience (e.g., cost and accessibility, cuisine type, food source type). We present a data-driven solution for meal recommendations that considers customizable meal configurations and time horizons. This solution balances user preferences while accounting for food constituents and cooking processes. Our contributions include introducing goodness measures, a recipe conversion method from text to the recently introduced multimodal rich recipe representation (R3) format, learning methods using contextual bandits that show promising preliminary results, and the prototype, usage-inspired, BEACON system."

In the rapidly evolving landscape of online recipe sharing within a globalized context, there has been a notable surge in research towards comprehending and generating food recipes. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) like GPT-2 and LLaVA have paved the way for Natural Language Processing (NLP) approaches to delve deeper into various facets of food-related tasks, encompassing ingredient recognition and comprehensive recipe generation. Despite impressive performance and multi-modal adaptability of LLMs, domain-specific training remains paramount for their effective application. This work evaluates existing LLMs for recipe generation and proposes LLaVA-Chef, a novel model trained on a curated dataset of diverse recipe prompts in a multi-stage approach. First, we refine the mapping of visual food image embeddings to the language space. Second, we adapt LLaVA to the food domain by fine-tuning it on relevant recipe data. Third, we utilize diverse prompts to enhance the model's recipe comprehension. Finally, we improve the linguistic quality of generated recipes by penalizing the model with a custom loss function. LLaVA-Chef demonstrates impressive improvements over pretrained LLMs and prior works. A detailed qualitative analysis reveals that LLaVA-Chef generates more detailed recipes with precise ingredient mentions, compared to existing approaches.

In the early 2000s, renowned chef Heston Blumenthal formulated his "food pairing" hypothesis, positing that if foods share many flavor compounds, then they tend to taste good when eaten together. In 2011, Ahn et al. conducted a study using a dataset of recipes, ingredients, and flavor compounds, finding that, in Western cuisine, ingredients in recipes often share more flavor compounds than expected by chance, indicating a natural tendency towards food pairing. Building upon Ahn's research, our work applies state-of-the-art collaborative filtering techniques to the dataset, providing a tool that can recommend new foods to add in recipes, retrieve missing ingredients and advise against certain combinations. We create our recommender in two ways, by taking into account ingredients appearances in recipes or shared flavor compounds between foods. While our analysis confirms the existence of food pairing, the recipe-based recommender performs significantly better than the flavor-based one, leading to the conclusion that food pairing is just one of the principles to take into account when creating recipes. Furthermore, and more interestingly, we find that food pairing in data is mostly due to trivial couplings of very similar ingredients, leading to a reconsideration of its current role in recipes, from being an already existing feature to a key to open up new scenarios in gastronomy. Our flavor-based recommender can thus leverage this novel concept and provide a new tool to lead culinary innovation.

A chef's intuition about flavor, texture, and cultural identity represents tacit knowledge that is difficult to articulate yet central to culinary practice. We show that this knowledge is already encoded in FlavorGraph's 300-dimensional ingredient embeddings, trained on recipe cooccurrence and food chemistry, and that it can be systematically recovered. An LLM-augmented curation pipeline consolidates 6,653 raw FlavorGraph ingredients into 1,032 canonical entries, substantially strengthening the recoverable structure. We identify at least fifteen independently classifiable dimensions spanning taste, texture, geography, food processing, and culture.

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.

People enjoy food photography because they appreciate food. Behind each meal there is a story described in a complex recipe and, unfortunately, by simply looking at a food image we do not have access to its preparation process. Therefore, in this paper we introduce an inverse cooking system that recreates cooking recipes given food images. Our system predicts ingredients as sets by means of a novel architecture, modeling their dependencies without imposing any order, and then generates cooking instructions by attending to both image and its inferred ingredients simultaneously. We extensively evaluate the whole system on the large-scale Recipe1M dataset and show that (1) we improve performance w.r.t. previous baselines for ingredient prediction; (2) we are able to obtain high quality recipes by leveraging both image and ingredients; (3) our system is able to produce more compelling recipes than retrieval-based approaches according to human judgment. We make code and models publicly available.

Interests in the automatic generation of cooking recipes have been growing steadily over the past few years thanks to a large amount of online cooking recipes. We present RecipeGPT, a novel online recipe generation and evaluation system. The system provides two modes of text generations: (1) instruction generation from given recipe title and ingredients; and (2) ingredient generation from recipe title and cooking instructions. Its back-end text generation module comprises a generative pre-trained language model GPT-2 fine-tuned on a large cooking recipe dataset. Moreover, the recipe evaluation module allows the users to conveniently inspect the quality of the generated recipe contents and store the results for future reference. RecipeGPT can be accessed online at https://recipegpt.org/.

Recipe generation from food images and ingredients is a challenging task, which requires the interpretation of the information from another modality. Different from the image captioning task, where the captions usually have one sentence, cooking instructions contain multiple sentences and have obvious structures. To help the model capture the recipe structure and avoid missing some cooking details, we propose a novel framework: Decomposing Generation Networks (DGN) with structure prediction, to get more structured and complete recipe generation outputs. Specifically, we split each cooking instruction into several phases, and assign different sub-generators to each phase. Our approach includes two novel ideas: (i) learning the recipe structures with the global structure prediction component and (ii) producing recipe phases in the sub-generator output component based on the predicted structure. Extensive experiments on the challenging large-scale Recipe1M dataset validate the effectiveness of our proposed model, which improves the performance over the state-of-the-art results.

In this paper, we are interested in modeling a how-to instructional procedure, such as a cooking recipe, with a meaningful and rich high-level representation. Specifically, we propose to represent cooking recipes and food images as cooking programs. Programs provide a structured representation of the task, capturing cooking semantics and sequential relationships of actions in the form of a graph. This allows them to be easily manipulated by users and executed by agents. To this end, we build a model that is trained to learn a joint embedding between recipes and food images via self-supervision and jointly generate a program from this embedding as a sequence. To validate our idea, we crowdsource programs for cooking recipes and show that: (a) projecting the image-recipe embeddings into programs leads to better cross-modal retrieval results; (b) generating programs from images leads to better recognition results compared to predicting raw cooking instructions; and (c) we can generate food images by manipulating programs via optimizing the latent code of a GAN. Code, data, and models are available online.

Cooking is a sequential and visually grounded activity, where each step such as chopping, mixing, or frying carries both procedural logic and visual semantics. While recent diffusion models have shown strong capabilities in text-to-image generation, they struggle to handle structured multi-step scenarios like recipe illustration. Additionally, current recipe illustration methods are unable to adjust to the natural variability in recipe length, generating a fixed number of images regardless of the actual instructions structure. To address these limitations, we present CookAnything, a flexible and consistent diffusion-based framework that generates coherent, semantically distinct image sequences from textual cooking instructions of arbitrary length. The framework introduces three key components: (1) Step-wise Regional Control (SRC), which aligns textual steps with corresponding image regions within a single denoising process; (2) Flexible RoPE, a step-aware positional encoding mechanism that enhances both temporal coherence and spatial diversity; and (3) Cross-Step Consistency Control (CSCC), which maintains fine-grained ingredient consistency across steps. Experimental results on recipe illustration benchmarks show that CookAnything performs better than existing methods in training-based and training-free settings. The proposed framework supports scalable, high-quality visual synthesis of complex multi-step instructions and holds significant potential for broad applications in instructional media, and procedural content creation.

In this paper, we propose a new class of metric for table structure recognition (TSR) evaluation, called grid table similarity (GriTS). Unlike prior metrics, GriTS evaluates the correctness of a predicted table directly in its natural form as a matrix. To create a similarity measure between matrices, we generalize the two-dimensional largest common substructure (2D-LCS) problem, which is NP-hard, to the 2D most similar substructures (2D-MSS) problem and propose a polynomial-time heuristic for solving it. This algorithm produces both an upper and a lower bound on the true similarity between matrices. We show using evaluation on a large real-world dataset that in practice there is almost no difference between these bounds. We compare GriTS to other metrics and empirically validate that matrix similarity exhibits more desirable behavior than alternatives for TSR performance evaluation. Finally, GriTS unifies all three subtasks of cell topology recognition, cell location recognition, and cell content recognition within the same framework, which simplifies the evaluation and enables more meaningful comparisons across different types of TSR approaches. Code will be released at https://github.com/microsoft/table-transformer.

Research on food image understanding using recipe data has been a long-standing focus due to the diversity and complexity of the data. Moreover, food is inextricably linked to people's lives, making it a vital research area for practical applications such as dietary management. Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, not only in their vast knowledge but also in their ability to handle languages naturally. While English is predominantly used, they can also support multiple languages including Japanese. This suggests that MLLMs are expected to significantly improve performance in food image understanding tasks. We fine-tuned open MLLMs LLaVA-1.5 and Phi-3 Vision on a Japanese recipe dataset and benchmarked their performance against the closed model GPT-4o. We then evaluated the content of generated recipes, including ingredients and cooking procedures, using 5,000 evaluation samples that comprehensively cover Japanese food culture. Our evaluation demonstrates that the open models trained on recipe data outperform GPT-4o, the current state-of-the-art model, in ingredient generation. Our model achieved F1 score of 0.531, surpassing GPT-4o's F1 score of 0.481, indicating a higher level of accuracy. Furthermore, our model exhibited comparable performance to GPT-4o in generating cooking procedure text.

Dish images play a crucial role in the digital era, with the demand for culturally distinctive dish images continuously increasing due to the digitization of the food industry and e-commerce. In general cases, existing text-to-image generation models excel in producing high-quality images; however, they struggle to capture diverse characteristics and faithful details of specific domains, particularly Chinese dishes. To address this limitation, we propose Omni-Dish, the first text-to-image generation model specifically tailored for Chinese dishes. We develop a comprehensive dish curation pipeline, building the largest dish dataset to date. Additionally, we introduce a recaption strategy and employ a coarse-to-fine training scheme to help the model better learn fine-grained culinary nuances. During inference, we enhance the user's textual input using a pre-constructed high-quality caption library and a large language model, enabling more photorealistic and faithful image generation. Furthermore, to extend our model's capability for dish editing tasks, we propose Concept-Enhanced P2P. Based on this approach, we build a dish editing dataset and train a specialized editing model. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our methods.

We present Epicure, a family of three sibling skip-gram ingredient embeddings retrained from scratch on a multilingual recipe corpus. We aggregate 4.14M recipes from 11 sources spanning seven languages, English, Chinese, Russian, Vietnamese, Spanish, Turkish, Indonesian, German, and Indian-English, and normalise the raw ingredient strings to 1,790 canonical entries via an LLM-augmented pipeline. A 203,508-edge ingredient-ingredient NPMI graph and an 80,019-edge typed FlavorDB ingredient-compound graph, 2,247 typed compound nodes across 15 categories, seed three Metapath2Vec variants that share architecture and hyperparameters and differ only in the random-walk schema: Cooc walks the co-occurrence graph only, Chem walks the typed compound metapaths only, and Core blends both via injected ingredient-ingredient walks at controlled mixing, placing each model at a distinct point on the chemistry-vs-recipe-context spectrum.

Food Computing is currently a fast-growing field of research. Natural language processing (NLP) is also increasingly essential in this field, especially for recognising food entities. However, there are still only a few well-defined tasks that serve as benchmarks for solutions in this area. We introduce a new dataset -- called TASTEset -- to bridge this gap. In this dataset, Named Entity Recognition (NER) models are expected to find or infer various types of entities helpful in processing recipes, e.g.~food products, quantities and their units, names of cooking processes, physical quality of ingredients, their purpose, taste. The dataset consists of 700 recipes with more than 13,000 entities to extract. We provide a few state-of-the-art baselines of named entity recognition models, which show that our dataset poses a solid challenge to existing models. The best model achieved, on average, 0.95 F_1 score, depending on the entity type -- from 0.781 to 0.982. We share the dataset and the task to encourage progress on more in-depth and complex information extraction from recipes.

Embedding based product recommendations have gained popularity in recent years due to its ability to easily integrate to large-scale systems and allowing nearest neighbor searches in real-time. The bulk of studies in this area has predominantly been focused on similar item recommendations. Research on complementary item recommendations, on the other hand, still remains considerably under-explored. We define similar items as items that are interchangeable in terms of their utility and complementary items as items that serve different purposes, yet are compatible when used with one another. In this paper, we apply a novel approach to finding complementary items by leveraging dual embedding representations for products. We demonstrate that the notion of relatedness discovered in NLP for skip-gram negative sampling (SGNS) models translates effectively to the concept of complementarity when training item representations using co-purchase data. Since sparsity of purchase data is a major challenge in real-world scenarios, we further augment the model using synthetic samples to extend coverage. This allows the model to provide complementary recommendations for items that do not share co-purchase data by leveraging other abundantly available data modalities such as images, text, clicks etc. We establish the effectiveness of our approach in improving both coverage and quality of recommendations on real world data for a major online retail company. We further show the importance of task specific hyperparameter tuning in training SGNS. Our model is effective yet simple to implement, making it a great candidate for generating complementary item recommendations at any e-commerce website.

The web is full of guidance on a wide variety of tasks, from changing the oil in your car to baking an apple pie. However, as content is created independently, a single task could have thousands of corresponding procedural texts. This makes it difficult for users to view the bigger picture and understand the multiple ways the task could be accomplished. In this work we propose an unsupervised learning approach for summarizing multiple procedural texts into an intuitive graph representation, allowing users to easily explore commonalities and differences. We demonstrate our approach on recipes, a prominent example of procedural texts. User studies show that our representation is intuitive and coherent and that it has the potential to help users with several sensemaking tasks, including adapting recipes for a novice cook and finding creative ways to spice up a dish.

Automatic food recipe generation methods provide a creative tool for chefs to explore and to create new, and interesting culinary delights. Given the recent success of large language models (LLMs), they have the potential to create new recipes that can meet individual preferences, dietary constraints, and adapt to what is in your refrigerator. Existing research on using LLMs to generate recipes has shown that LLMs can be finetuned to generate realistic-sounding recipes. However, on close examination, these generated recipes often fail to meet basic requirements like including chicken as an ingredient in chicken dishes. In this paper, we propose RecipeMC, a text generation method using GPT-2 that relies on Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). RecipeMC allows us to define reward functions to put soft constraints on text generation and thus improve the credibility of the generated recipes. Our results show that human evaluators prefer recipes generated with RecipeMC more often than recipes generated with other baseline methods when compared with real recipes.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on a vast amount of procedural texts, but they do not directly observe real-world phenomena. In the context of cooking recipes, this poses a challenge, as intermediate states of ingredients are often omitted, making it difficult for models to track ingredient states and understand recipes accurately. In this paper, we apply state probing, a method for evaluating a language model's understanding of the world, to the domain of cooking. We propose a new task and dataset for evaluating how well LLMs can recognize intermediate ingredient states during cooking procedures. We first construct a new Japanese recipe dataset with clear and accurate annotations of ingredient state changes, collected from well-structured and controlled recipe texts. Using this dataset, we design three novel tasks to evaluate whether LLMs can track ingredient state transitions and identify ingredients present at intermediate steps. Our experiments with widely used LLMs, such as Llama3.1-70B and Qwen2.5-72B, show that learning ingredient state knowledge improves their understanding of cooking processes, achieving performance comparable to commercial LLMs.

The proliferation of digital food content has intensified the need for robust and accurate systems capable of fine-grained visual understanding and retrieval. In this work, we address the challenging task of food image-to-text matching, a critical component in applications such as dietary monitoring, smart kitchens, and restaurant automation. We propose F4-ITS: Fine-grained Feature Fusion for Food Image-Text Search, a training-free, vision-language model (VLM)-guided framework that significantly improves retrieval performance through enhanced multi-modal feature representations. Our approach introduces two key contributions: (1) a uni-directional(and bi-directional) multi-modal fusion strategy that combines image embeddings with VLM-generated textual descriptions to improve query expressiveness, and (2) a novel feature-based re-ranking mechanism for top-k retrieval, leveraging predicted food ingredients to refine results and boost precision. Leveraging open-source image-text encoders, we demonstrate substantial gains over standard baselines - achieving ~10% and ~7.7% improvements in top-1 retrieval under dense and sparse caption scenarios, and a ~28.6% gain in top-k ingredient-level retrieval. Additionally, we show that smaller models (e.g., ViT-B/32) can match or outperform larger counterparts (e.g., ViT-H, ViT-G, ViT-bigG) when augmented with textual fusion, highlighting the effectiveness of our method in resource-constrained settings. Code and test datasets will be made publicly available at: https://github.com/mailcorahul/f4-its

Calorie and nutrition research has attained increased interest in recent years. But, due to the complexity of the problem, literature in this area focuses on a limited subset of ingredients or dish types and simple convolutional neural networks or traditional machine learning. Simultaneously, estimation of ingredient portions can help improve calorie estimation and meal re-production from a given image. In this paper, given a single cooking image, a pipeline for calorie estimation and meal re-production for different servings of the meal is proposed. The pipeline contains two stages. In the first stage, a set of ingredients associated with the meal in the given image are predicted. In the second stage, given image features and ingredients, portions of the ingredients and finally the total meal calorie are simultaneously estimated using a deep transformer-based model. Portion estimation introduced in the model helps improve calorie estimation and is also beneficial for meal re-production in different serving sizes. To demonstrate the benefits of the pipeline, the model can be used for meal kits generation. To evaluate the pipeline, the large scale dataset Recipe1M is used. Prior to experiments, the Recipe1M dataset is parsed and explicitly annotated with portions of ingredients. Experiments show that using ingredients and their portions significantly improves calorie estimation. Also, a visual interface is created in which a user can interact with the pipeline to reach accurate calorie estimations and generate a meal kit for cooking purposes.

Enterprises often own large collections of structured data in the form of large databases or an enterprise data lake. Such data collections come with limited metadata and strict access policies that could limit access to the data contents and, therefore, limit the application of classic retrieval and analysis solutions. As a result, there is a need for solutions that can effectively utilize the available metadata. In this paper, we study the problem of matching table metadata to a business glossary containing data labels and descriptions. The resulting matching enables the use of an available or curated business glossary for retrieval and analysis without or before requesting access to the data contents. One solution to this problem is to use manually-defined rules or similarity measures on column names and glossary descriptions (or their vector embeddings) to find the closest match. However, such approaches need to be tuned through manual labeling and cannot handle many business glossaries that contain a combination of simple as well as complex and long descriptions. In this work, we leverage the power of large language models (LLMs) to design generic matching methods that do not require manual tuning and can identify complex relations between column names and glossaries. We propose methods that utilize LLMs in two ways: a) by generating additional context for column names that can aid with matching b) by using LLMs to directly infer if there is a relation between column names and glossary descriptions. Our preliminary experimental results show the effectiveness of our proposed methods.

In the current landscape of Large Language Models (LLMs), the curation of large-scale, high-quality training data is a primary driver of model performance. A key lever is the data recipe, which comprises a data processing pipeline to transform raw sources into training corpora. Despite the growing use of LLMs to automate individual data processing steps, such as data synthesis and filtering, the overall design of data recipes remains largely manual and labor-intensive, requiring substantial human expertise and iteration. To bridge this gap, we formulate end-to-end data recipe generation for LLM adaptation. Given a target benchmark and a pool of available data sources, a model is required to output a complete data recipe that adapts a base LLM to the target task. We present DataChef-32B, which performs online reinforcement learning using a proxy reward that predicts downstream performance for candidate recipes. Across six held-out tasks, DataChef-32B produces practical recipes that reach comparable downstream performance to those curated by human experts. Notably, the recipe from DataChef-32B adapts Qwen3-1.7B-Base to the math domain, achieving 66.7 on AIME'25 and surpassing Qwen3-1.7B. This work sheds new light on automating LLM training and developing self-evolving AI systems.

In this paper we introduce the FooDI-ML dataset. This dataset contains over 1.5M unique images and over 9.5M store names, product names descriptions, and collection sections gathered from the Glovo application. The data made available corresponds to food, drinks and groceries products from 37 countries in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. The dataset comprehends 33 languages, including 870K samples of languages of countries from Eastern Europe and Western Asia such as Ukrainian and Kazakh, which have been so far underrepresented in publicly available visio-linguistic datasets. The dataset also includes widely spoken languages such as Spanish and English. To assist further research, we include benchmarks over two tasks: text-image retrieval and conditional image generation.

The effectiveness of recommendation systems is pivotal to user engagement and satisfaction in online platforms. As these recommendation systems increasingly influence user choices, their evaluation transcends mere technical performance and becomes central to business success. This paper addresses the multifaceted nature of recommendations system evaluation by introducing a comprehensive suite of metrics, each tailored to capture a distinct aspect of system performance. We discuss * Similarity Metrics: to quantify the precision of content-based filtering mechanisms and assess the accuracy of collaborative filtering techniques. * Candidate Generation Metrics: to evaluate how effectively the system identifies a broad yet relevant range of items. * Predictive Metrics: to assess the accuracy of forecasted user preferences. * Ranking Metrics: to evaluate the effectiveness of the order in which recommendations are presented. * Business Metrics: to align the performance of the recommendation system with economic objectives. Our approach emphasizes the contextual application of these metrics and their interdependencies. In this paper, we identify the strengths and limitations of current evaluation practices and highlight the nuanced trade-offs that emerge when optimizing recommendation systems across different metrics. The paper concludes by proposing a framework for selecting and interpreting these metrics to not only improve system performance but also to advance business goals. This work is to aid researchers and practitioners in critically assessing recommendation systems and fosters the development of more nuanced, effective, and economically viable personalization strategies. Our code is available at GitHub - https://github.com/aryan-jadon/Evaluation-Metrics-for-Recommendation-Systems.

Automatically constructing a food diary that tracks the ingredients consumed can help people follow a healthy diet. We tackle the problem of food ingredients recognition as a multi-label learning problem. We propose a method for adapting a highly performing state of the art CNN in order to act as a multi-label predictor for learning recipes in terms of their list of ingredients. We prove that our model is able to, given a picture, predict its list of ingredients, even if the recipe corresponding to the picture has never been seen by the model. We make public two new datasets suitable for this purpose. Furthermore, we prove that a model trained with a high variability of recipes and ingredients is able to generalize better on new data, and visualize how it specializes each of its neurons to different ingredients.

Food recognition plays an important role in food choice and intake, which is essential to the health and well-being of humans. It is thus of importance to the computer vision community, and can further support many food-oriented vision and multimodal tasks. Unfortunately, we have witnessed remarkable advancements in generic visual recognition for released large-scale datasets, yet largely lags in the food domain. In this paper, we introduce Food2K, which is the largest food recognition dataset with 2,000 categories and over 1 million images.Compared with existing food recognition datasets, Food2K bypasses them in both categories and images by one order of magnitude, and thus establishes a new challenging benchmark to develop advanced models for food visual representation learning. Furthermore, we propose a deep progressive region enhancement network for food recognition, which mainly consists of two components, namely progressive local feature learning and region feature enhancement. The former adopts improved progressive training to learn diverse and complementary local features, while the latter utilizes self-attention to incorporate richer context with multiple scales into local features for further local feature enhancement. Extensive experiments on Food2K demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. More importantly, we have verified better generalization ability of Food2K in various tasks, including food recognition, food image retrieval, cross-modal recipe retrieval, food detection and segmentation. Food2K can be further explored to benefit more food-relevant tasks including emerging and more complex ones (e.g., nutritional understanding of food), and the trained models on Food2K can be expected as backbones to improve the performance of more food-relevant tasks. We also hope Food2K can serve as a large scale fine-grained visual recognition benchmark.

Data teams at frontier AI companies routinely train small proxy models to make critical decisions about pretraining data recipes for full-scale training runs. However, the community has a limited understanding of whether and when conclusions drawn from small-scale experiments reliably transfer to full-scale model training. In this work, we uncover a subtle yet critical issue in the standard experimental protocol for data recipe assessment: the use of identical small-scale model training configurations across all data recipes in the name of "fair" comparison. We show that the experiment conclusions about data quality can flip with even minor adjustments to training hyperparameters, as the optimal training configuration is inherently data-dependent. Moreover, this fixed-configuration protocol diverges from full-scale model development pipelines, where hyperparameter optimization is a standard step. Consequently, we posit that the objective of data recipe assessment should be to identify the recipe that yields the best performance under data-specific tuning. To mitigate the high cost of hyperparameter tuning, we introduce a simple patch to the evaluation protocol: using reduced learning rates for proxy model training. We show that this approach yields relative performance that strongly correlates with that of fully tuned large-scale LLM pretraining runs. Theoretically, we prove that for random-feature models, this approach preserves the ordering of datasets according to their optimal achievable loss. Empirically, we validate this approach across 23 data recipes covering four critical dimensions of data curation, demonstrating dramatic improvements in the reliability of small-scale experiments.

Following step-by-step procedures is an essential component of various activities carried out by individuals in their daily lives. These procedures serve as a guiding framework that helps to achieve goals efficiently, whether it is assembling furniture or preparing a recipe. However, the complexity and duration of procedural activities inherently increase the likelihood of making errors. Understanding such procedural activities from a sequence of frames is a challenging task that demands an accurate interpretation of visual information and the ability to reason about the structure of the activity. To this end, we collect a new egocentric 4D dataset, CaptainCook4D, comprising 384 recordings (94.5 hours) of people performing recipes in real kitchen environments. This dataset consists of two distinct types of activity: one in which participants adhere to the provided recipe instructions and another in which they deviate and induce errors. We provide 5.3K step annotations and 10K fine-grained action annotations and benchmark the dataset for the following tasks: supervised error recognition, multistep localization, and procedure learning

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at many tasks, yet they struggle to produce truly creative, diverse ideas. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach that enhances LLM creativity. We apply LLMs for translating between natural language and structured representations, and perform the core creative leap via cognitively inspired manipulations on these representations. Our notion of creativity goes beyond superficial token-level variations; rather, we recombine structured representations of existing ideas, enabling our system to effectively explore a more abstract landscape of ideas. We demonstrate our approach in the culinary domain with DishCOVER, a model that generates creative recipes. Experiments and domain-expert evaluations reveal that our outputs, which are mostly coherent and feasible, significantly surpass GPT-4o in terms of novelty and diversity, thus outperforming it in creative generation. We hope our work inspires further research into structured creativity in AI.

Cooking is a uniquely human endeavor for transforming raw ingredients into delicious dishes. Over centuries, cultures worldwide have evolved diverse cooking practices ingrained in their culinary traditions. Recipes, thus, are cultural capsules that capture culinary knowledge in elaborate cooking protocols. While simple quantitative models have probed the patterns in recipe composition and the process of cuisine evolution, unlike other cultural quirks such as language, the principles of cooking remain hitherto unexplored. The fundamental rules that drive the act of cooking, shaping recipe composition and cuisine architecture, are unclear. Here we present a generative grammar of cooking that captures the underlying culinary logic. By studying an extensive repository of structured recipes, we identify core concepts and rules that together forge a combinatorial system for culinary synthesis. Building on the body of work done in the context of language, the demonstration of a logically consistent generative framework offers profound insights into the act of cooking. Given the central role of food in nutrition and lifestyle disorders, culinary grammar provides leverage to improve public health through dietary interventions beyond applications for creative pursuits such as novel recipe generation.

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) data selection is commonly formulated as instance ranking: score each example and retain a top-k subset. However, effective SFT training subsets are often produced through ordered curation recipes, where filtering, mixing, and deduplication operators jointly shape the final data distribution. We formulate this problem as fixed-pool data recipe search: given a raw instruction pool and a library of grounded operators, the goal is to discover an executable recipe that constructs a high-quality selected subset under a limited budget of full SFT evaluations, without generating, rewriting, or augmenting training samples. We introduce AutoSelection, a two-layer solver that decouples fixed-pool materialization based on cached task-, data-, and model-side signals from expensive full evaluation, using warmup probes, realized subset states, local recipe edits, Gaussian-process-assisted ranking, and stagnation-triggered reseeding. Experiments on a 90K instruction pool show that AutoSelection achieves the strongest in-distribution reasoning average across three base models, outperforming full-data training, random recipe search, random top-k, and single-operator selectors. Additional Out-of-distribution graph-reasoning results, search-stability analyses, structural ablations, and 1.5B-to-7B transfer checks further show that recipe structure matters beyond individual selection operators. Code is available at https://github.com/w253/AutoSelection.

Visual similarities discovery (VSD) is an important task with broad e-commerce applications. Given an image of a certain object, the goal of VSD is to retrieve images of different objects with high perceptual visual similarity. Although being a highly addressed problem, the evaluation of proposed methods for VSD is often based on a proxy of an identification-retrieval task, evaluating the ability of a model to retrieve different images of the same object. We posit that evaluating VSD methods based on identification tasks is limited, and faithful evaluation must rely on expert annotations. In this paper, we introduce the first large-scale fashion visual similarity benchmark dataset, consisting of more than 110K expert-annotated image pairs. Besides this major contribution, we share insight from the challenges we faced while curating this dataset. Based on these insights, we propose a novel and efficient labeling procedure that can be applied to any dataset. Our analysis examines its limitations and inductive biases, and based on these findings, we propose metrics to mitigate those limitations. Though our primary focus lies on visual similarity, the methodologies we present have broader applications for discovering and evaluating perceptual similarity across various domains.

Food image segmentation is a critical and indispensible task for developing health-related applications such as estimating food calories and nutrients. Existing food image segmentation models are underperforming due to two reasons: (1) there is a lack of high quality food image datasets with fine-grained ingredient labels and pixel-wise location masks -- the existing datasets either carry coarse ingredient labels or are small in size; and (2) the complex appearance of food makes it difficult to localize and recognize ingredients in food images, e.g., the ingredients may overlap one another in the same image, and the identical ingredient may appear distinctly in different food images. In this work, we build a new food image dataset FoodSeg103 (and its extension FoodSeg154) containing 9,490 images. We annotate these images with 154 ingredient classes and each image has an average of 6 ingredient labels and pixel-wise masks. In addition, we propose a multi-modality pre-training approach called ReLeM that explicitly equips a segmentation model with rich and semantic food knowledge. In experiments, we use three popular semantic segmentation methods (i.e., Dilated Convolution based, Feature Pyramid based, and Vision Transformer based) as baselines, and evaluate them as well as ReLeM on our new datasets. We believe that the FoodSeg103 (and its extension FoodSeg154) and the pre-trained models using ReLeM can serve as a benchmark to facilitate future works on fine-grained food image understanding. We make all these datasets and methods public at https://xiongweiwu.github.io/foodseg103.html.

Food computing is both important and challenging in computer vision (CV). It significantly contributes to the development of CV algorithms due to its frequent presence in datasets across various applications, ranging from classification and instance segmentation to 3D reconstruction. The polymorphic shapes and textures of food, coupled with high variation in forms and vast multimodal information, including language descriptions and nutritional data, make food computing a complex and demanding task for modern CV algorithms. 3D food modeling is a new frontier for addressing food-related problems, due to its inherent capability to deal with random camera views and its straightforward representation for calculating food portion size. However, the primary hurdle in the development of algorithms for food object analysis is the lack of nutrition values in existing 3D datasets. Moreover, in the broader field of 3D research, there is a critical need for domain-specific test datasets. To bridge the gap between general 3D vision and food computing research, we propose MetaFood3D. This dataset consists of 637 meticulously labeled 3D food objects across 108 categories, featuring detailed nutrition information, weight, and food codes linked to a comprehensive nutrition database. The dataset emphasizes intra-class diversity and includes rich modalities such as textured mesh files, RGB-D videos, and segmentation masks. Experimental results demonstrate our dataset's significant potential for improving algorithm performance, highlight the challenging gap between video captures and 3D scanned data, and show the strength of the MetaFood3D dataset in high-quality data generation, simulation, and augmentation.

This paper introduces a public dataset of 1.4 million procedurally-generated bicycle designs represented parametrically, as JSON files, and as rasterized images. The dataset is created through the use of a rendering engine which harnesses the BikeCAD software to generate vector graphics from parametric designs. This rendering engine is discussed in the paper and also released publicly alongside the dataset. Though this dataset has numerous applications, a principal motivation is the need to train cross-modal predictive models between parametric and image-based design representations. For example, we demonstrate that a predictive model can be trained to accurately estimate Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) embeddings from a parametric representation directly. This allows similarity relations to be established between parametric bicycle designs and text strings or reference images. Trained predictive models are also made public. The dataset joins the BIKED dataset family which includes thousands of mixed-representation human-designed bicycle models and several datasets quantifying design performance. The code and dataset can be found at: https://github.com/Lyleregenwetter/BIKED_multimodal/tree/main

Retrieving procedure-oriented evidence from materials science papers is difficult because key synthesis details are often scattered across long, context-heavy documents and are not well captured by paragraph-only dense retrieval. We present RECIPER, a dual-view retrieval pipeline that indexes both paragraph-level context and compact large language model-extracted procedural summaries, then combines the two candidate streams with lightweight lexical reranking. Across four dense retrieval backbones, RECIPER consistently improves early-rank retrieval over paragraph-only dense retrieval, achieving average gains of +3.73 in Recall@1, +2.85 in nDCG@10, and +3.13 in MRR. With BGE-large-en-v1.5, it reaches 86.82%, 97.07%, and 97.85% on Recall@1, Recall@5, and Recall@10, respectively. We further observe improved downstream question answering under automatic metrics, suggesting that procedural summaries can serve as a useful complementary retrieval signal for procedure-oriented materials question answering. Code and data are available at https://github.com/ReaganWu/RECIPER.

We present WineSensed, a large multimodal wine dataset for studying the relations between visual perception, language, and flavor. The dataset encompasses 897k images of wine labels and 824k reviews of wines curated from the Vivino platform. It has over 350k unique vintages, annotated with year, region, rating, alcohol percentage, price, and grape composition. We obtained fine-grained flavor annotations on a subset by conducting a wine-tasting experiment with 256 participants who were asked to rank wines based on their similarity in flavor, resulting in more than 5k pairwise flavor distances. We propose a low-dimensional concept embedding algorithm that combines human experience with automatic machine similarity kernels. We demonstrate that this shared concept embedding space improves upon separate embedding spaces for coarse flavor classification (alcohol percentage, country, grape, price, rating) and aligns with the intricate human perception of flavor.

Quantifying the similarity between two mathematical structures or datasets constitutes a particularly interesting and useful operation in several theoretical and applied problems. Aimed at this specific objective, the Jaccard index has been extensively used in the most diverse types of problems, also motivating some respective generalizations. The present work addresses further generalizations of this index, including its modification into a coincidence index capable of accounting also for the level of relative interiority between the two compared entities, as well as respective extensions for sets in continuous vector spaces, the generalization to multiset addition, densities and generic scalar fields, as well as a means to quantify the joint interdependence between two random variables. The also interesting possibility to take into account more than two sets has also been addressed, including the description of an index capable of quantifying the level of chaining between three structures. Several of the described and suggested eneralizations have been illustrated with respect to numeric case examples. It is also posited that these indices can play an important role while analyzing and integrating datasets in modeling approaches and pattern recognition activities, including as a measurement of clusters similarity or separation and as a resource for representing and analyzing complex networks.

The integration of generative AI in education is expanding, yet empirical analyses of large-scale and real-world interactions between students and AI systems still remain limited. Addressing this gap, we present RECIPE4U (RECIPE for University), a dataset sourced from a semester-long experiment with 212 college students in English as Foreign Language (EFL) writing courses. During the study, students engaged in dialogues with ChatGPT to revise their essays. RECIPE4U includes comprehensive records of these interactions, including conversation logs, students' intent, students' self-rated satisfaction, and students' essay edit histories. In particular, we annotate the students' utterances in RECIPE4U with 13 intention labels based on our coding schemes. We establish baseline results for two subtasks in task-oriented dialogue systems within educational contexts: intent detection and satisfaction estimation. As a foundational step, we explore student-ChatGPT interaction patterns through RECIPE4U and analyze them by focusing on students' dialogue, essay data statistics, and students' essay edits. We further illustrate potential applications of RECIPE4U dataset for enhancing the incorporation of LLMs in educational frameworks. RECIPE4U is publicly available at https://zeunie.github.io/RECIPE4U/.

The paper considers a new quantitative-qualitative proximity measure for the features of information objects, where data enters a common information resource from several sources independently. The goal is to determine the possibility of their relation to the same physical object (observation object). The proposed measure accounts for the possibility of differences in individual feature values - both quantitative and qualitative - caused by existing determination errors. To analyze the proximity of quantitative feature values, the author employs a probabilistic measure; for qualitative features, a measure of possibility is used. The paper demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed measure by checking its compliance with the axioms required of any measure. Unlike many known measures, the proposed approach does not require feature value transformation to ensure comparability. The work also proposes several variants of measures to determine the proximity of information objects (IO) based on a group of diverse features.

Procedural videos, exemplified by recipe demonstrations, are instrumental in conveying step-by-step instructions. However, understanding such videos is challenging as it involves the precise localization of steps and the generation of textual instructions. Manually annotating steps and writing instructions is costly, which limits the size of current datasets and hinders effective learning. Leveraging large but noisy video-transcript datasets for pre-training can boost performance but demands significant computational resources. Furthermore, transcripts contain irrelevant content and differ in style from human-written instructions. To mitigate these issues, we propose a novel technique, Sieve-&-Swap, to automatically generate high-quality training data for the recipe domain: (i) Sieve: filters irrelevant transcripts and (ii) Swap: acquires high-quality text by replacing transcripts with human-written instruction from a text-only recipe dataset. The resulting dataset is three orders of magnitude smaller than current web-scale datasets but enables efficient training of large-scale models. Alongside Sieve-&-Swap, we propose Procedure Transformer (ProcX), a model for end-to-end step localization and instruction generation for procedural videos. When pre-trained on our curated dataset, this model achieves state-of-the-art performance on YouCook2 and Tasty while using a fraction of the training data. We have released code and dataset.

Tables are a popular and efficient means of presenting structured information. They are used extensively in various kinds of documents including web pages. Tables display information as a two-dimensional matrix, the semantics of which is conveyed by a mixture of structure (rows, columns), headers, caption, and content. Recent research has started to consider tables as first class objects, not just as an addendum to texts, yielding interesting results for problems like table matching, table completion, or value imputation. All of these problems inherently rely on an accurate measure for the semantic similarity of two tables. We present TabSim, a novel method to compute table similarity scores using deep neural networks. Conceptually, TabSim represents a table as a learned concatenation of embeddings of its caption, its content, and its structure. Given two tables in this representation, a Siamese neural network is trained to compute a score correlating with the tables' semantic similarity. To train and evaluate our method, we created a gold standard corpus consisting of 1500 table pairs extracted from biomedical articles and manually scored regarding their degree of similarity, and adopted two other corpora originally developed for a different yet similar task. Our evaluation shows that TabSim outperforms other table similarity measures on average by app. 7% pp F1-score in a binary similarity classification setting and by app. 1.5% pp in a ranking scenario.

How can we discover join relationships among columns of tabular data in a data repository? Can this be done effectively when metadata is missing? Traditional column matching works mainly rely on similarity measures based on exact value overlaps, hence missing important semantics or failing to handle noise in the data. At the same time, recent dataset discovery methods focusing on deep table representation learning techniques, do not take into consideration the rich set of column similarity signals found in prior matching and discovery methods. Finally, existing methods heavily depend on user-provided similarity thresholds, hindering their deployability in real-world settings. In this paper, we propose OmniMatch, a novel join discovery technique that detects equi-joins and fuzzy-joins betwen columns by combining column-pair similarity measures with Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). OmniMatch's GNN can capture column relatedness leveraging graph transitivity, significantly improving the recall of join discovery tasks. At the same time, OmniMatch also increases the precision by augmenting its training data with negative column join examples through an automated negative example generation process. Most importantly, compared to the state-of-the-art matching and discovery methods, OmniMatch exhibits up to 14% higher effectiveness in F1 score and AUC without relying on metadata or user-provided thresholds for each similarity metric.

We present MM-Food-100K, a public 100,000-sample multimodal food intelligence dataset with verifiable provenance. It is a curated approximately 10% open subset of an original 1.2 million, quality-accepted corpus of food images annotated for a wide range of information (such as dish name, region of creation). The corpus was collected over six weeks from over 87,000 contributors using the Codatta contribution model, which combines community sourcing with configurable AI-assisted quality checks; each submission is linked to a wallet address in a secure off-chain ledger for traceability, with a full on-chain protocol on the roadmap. We describe the schema, pipeline, and QA, and validate utility by fine-tuning large vision-language models (ChatGPT 5, ChatGPT OSS, Qwen-Max) on image-based nutrition prediction. Fine-tuning yields consistent gains over out-of-box baselines across standard metrics; we report results primarily on the MM-Food-100K subset. We release MM-Food-100K for publicly free access and retain approximately 90% for potential commercial access with revenue sharing to contributors.

We present ModelTables, a benchmark of tables in Model Lakes that captures the structured semantics of performance and configuration tables often overlooked by text only retrieval. The corpus is built from Hugging Face model cards, GitHub READMEs, and referenced papers, linking each table to its surrounding model and publication context. Compared with open data lake tables, model tables are smaller yet exhibit denser inter table relationships, reflecting tightly coupled model and benchmark evolution. The current release covers over 60K models and 90K tables. To evaluate model and table relatedness, we construct a multi source ground truth using three complementary signals: (1) paper citation links, (2) explicit model card links and inheritance, and (3) shared training datasets. We present one extensive empirical use case for the benchmark which is table search. We compare canonical Data Lake search operators (unionable, joinable, keyword) and Information Retrieval baselines (dense, sparse, hybrid retrieval) on this benchmark. Union based semantic table retrieval attains 54.8 % P@1 overall (54.6 % on citation, 31.3 % on inheritance, 30.6 % on shared dataset signals); table based dense retrieval reaches 66.5 % P@1, and metadata hybrid retrieval achieves 54.1 %. This evaluation indicates clear room for developing better table search methods. By releasing ModelTables and its creation protocol, we provide the first large scale benchmark of structured data describing AI model. Our use case of table discovery in Model Lakes, provides intuition and evidence for developing more accurate semantic retrieval, structured comparison, and principled organization of structured model knowledge. Source code, data, and other artifacts have been made available at https://github.com/RJMillerLab/ModelTables.

Requirement traceability is the process of identifying the inter-dependencies between requirements. It poses a significant challenge when conducted manually, especially when dealing with requirements at various levels of abstraction. In this work, we propose a novel approach to automate the task of linking high-level business requirements with more technical system requirements. The proposed approach begins by representing each requirement using a Bag of-Words (BOW) model combined with the Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) scoring function. Then, we suggested an enhanced cosine similarity that uses recent advances in word embedding representation to correct traditional cosine similarity function limitations. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we conducted experiments on three well-known datasets: COEST, WARC(NFR), and WARC(FRS). The results demonstrate that our approach significantly improves efficiency compared to existing methods. We achieved better results with an increase of approximately 18.4% in one of the datasets, as measured by the F2 score.

Many learning algorithms such as kernel machines, nearest neighbors, clustering, or anomaly detection, are based on the concept of 'distance' or 'similarity'. Before similarities are used for training an actual machine learning model, we would like to verify that they are bound to meaningful patterns in the data. In this paper, we propose to make similarities interpretable by augmenting them with an explanation in terms of input features. We develop BiLRP, a scalable and theoretically founded method to systematically decompose similarity scores on pairs of input features. Our method can be expressed as a composition of LRP explanations, which were shown in previous works to scale to highly nonlinear functions. Through an extensive set of experiments, we demonstrate that BiLRP robustly explains complex similarity models, e.g. built on VGG-16 deep neural network features. Additionally, we apply our method to an open problem in digital humanities: detailed assessment of similarity between historical documents such as astronomical tables. Here again, BiLRP provides insight and brings verifiability into a highly engineered and problem-specific similarity model.

Assessing similarity in source code has gained significant attention in recent years due to its importance in software engineering tasks such as clone detection and code search and recommendation. This work presents a comparative analysis of unsupervised similarity measures for identifying source code clone detection. The goal is to overview the current state-of-the-art techniques, their strengths, and weaknesses. To do that, we compile the existing unsupervised strategies and evaluate their performance on a benchmark dataset to guide software engineers in selecting appropriate methods for their specific use cases. The source code of this study is available at https://github.com/jorge-martinez-gil/codesim

Foundation models rely on large-scale web-crawled datasets, which frequently contain noisy data, biases, and irrelevant content. Existing data selection techniques typically use human heuristics, downstream evaluation datasets, or specialized scoring models, and can overlook samples' utility in the training process. Instead, we propose a new approach, Mimic Score, a data quality metric that uses a pretrained reference model as a guide to assess the usefulness of data samples for training a new model. It relies on the alignment between the gradient of the new model parameters and the vector pointing toward the reference model in weight space. Samples that misalign with this direction are considered low-value and can be filtered out. Motivated by the Mimic score, we develop Grad-Mimic, a data selection framework that identifies and prioritizes useful samples, automating the selection process to create effective filters. Empirically, using Mimic scores to guide model training results in consistent performance gains across six image datasets and enhances the performance of CLIP models. Moreover, Mimic scores and their associated filters improve upon existing filtering methods and offer accurate estimation of dataset quality.

Recently similarity graphs became the leading paradigm for efficient nearest neighbor search, outperforming traditional tree-based and LSH-based methods. Similarity graphs perform the search via greedy routing: a query traverses the graph and in each vertex moves to the adjacent vertex that is the closest to this query. In practice, similarity graphs are often susceptible to local minima, when queries do not reach its nearest neighbors, getting stuck in suboptimal vertices. In this paper we propose to learn the routing function that overcomes local minima via incorporating information about the graph global structure. In particular, we augment the vertices of a given graph with additional representations that are learned to provide the optimal routing from the start vertex to the query nearest neighbor. By thorough experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed learnable routing successfully diminishes the local minima problem and significantly improves the overall search performance.

Individual user fairness is commonly understood as treating similar users similarly. In Recommender Systems (RSs), several evaluation measures exist for quantifying individual user fairness. These measures evaluate fairness via either: (i) the disparity in RS effectiveness scores regardless of user similarity, or (ii) the disparity in items recommended to similar users regardless of item relevance. Both disparity in recommendation effectiveness and user similarity are very important in fairness, yet no existing individual user fairness measure simultaneously accounts for both. In brief, current user fairness evaluation measures implement a largely incomplete definition of fairness. To fill this gap, we present Pairwise User unFairness (PUF), a novel evaluation measure of individual user fairness that considers both effectiveness disparity and user similarity. PUF is the only measure that can express this important distinction. We empirically validate that PUF does this consistently across 4 datasets and 7 rankers, and robustly when varying user similarity or effectiveness. In contrast, all other measures are either almost insensitive to effectiveness disparity or completely insensitive to user similarity. We contribute the first RS evaluation measure to reliably capture both user similarity and effectiveness in individual user fairness. Our code: https://github.com/theresiavr/PUF-individual-user-fairness-recsys.

We consider the Similarity Sketching problem: Given a universe [u] = {0,ldots, u-1} we want a random function S mapping subsets Asubseteq [u] into vectors S(A) of size t, such that the Jaccard similarity J(A,B) = |Acap B|/|Acup B| between sets A and B is preserved. More precisely, define X_i = [S(A)[i] = S(B)[i]] and X = sum_{iin [t]} X_i. We want E[X_i]=J(A,B), and we want X to be strongly concentrated around E[X] = t cdot J(A,B) (i.e. Chernoff-style bounds). This is a fundamental problem which has found numerous applications in data mining, large-scale classification, computer vision, similarity search, etc. via the classic MinHash algorithm. The vectors S(A) are also called sketches. Strong concentration is critical, for often we want to sketch many sets B_1,ldots,B_n so that we later, for a query set A, can find (one of) the most similar B_i. It is then critical that no B_i looks much more similar to A due to errors in the sketch. The seminal ttimesMinHash algorithm uses t random hash functions h_1,ldots, h_t, and stores left ( min_{ain A} h_1(A),ldots, min_{ain A} h_t(A) right ) as the sketch of A. The main drawback of MinHash is, however, its O(tcdot |A|) running time, and finding a sketch with similar properties and faster running time has been the subject of several papers. (continued...)

Semantic similarity measures are widely used in natural language processing to catalyze various computer-related tasks. However, no single semantic similarity measure is the most appropriate for all tasks, and researchers often use ensemble strategies to ensure performance. This research work proposes a method for automatically designing semantic similarity ensembles. In fact, our proposed method uses grammatical evolution, for the first time, to automatically select and aggregate measures from a pool of candidates to create an ensemble that maximizes correlation to human judgment. The method is evaluated on several benchmark datasets and compared to state-of-the-art ensembles, showing that it can significantly improve similarity assessment accuracy and outperform existing methods in some cases. As a result, our research demonstrates the potential of using grammatical evolution to automatically compare text and prove the benefits of using ensembles for semantic similarity tasks. The source code that illustrates our approach can be downloaded from https://github.com/jorge-martinez-gil/sesige.

Croissant has emerged as the metadata standard for machine learning datasets, providing a structured, JSON-LD-based format that makes dataset discovery, automated ingestion, and reproducible analysis machine-checkable across ML platforms. Adoption has accelerated, and NeurIPS now requires Croissant metadata in every submission to its dataset tracks. Yet in practice Croissant generation usually starts with uploading data to a public platform, a path infeasible for governed and large local repositories that hold much of the high-value data ML increasingly relies on. We release Croissant Baker, a local-first, open-source command-line tool that generates validated Croissant metadata directly from a dataset directory through a modular handler registry. We evaluate Croissant Baker on over 140 datasets, scaling to MIMIC-IV at 886 million rows and 374 Parquet files. On held-out comparisons against producer-authored or standards-derived ground truth, Croissant Baker reaches 97-100% agreement across multiple domains.

We propose Meta-Prod2vec, a novel method to compute item similarities for recommendation that leverages existing item metadata. Such scenarios are frequently encountered in applications such as content recommendation, ad targeting and web search. Our method leverages past user interactions with items and their attributes to compute low-dimensional embeddings of items. Specifically, the item metadata is in- jected into the model as side information to regularize the item embeddings. We show that the new item representa- tions lead to better performance on recommendation tasks on an open music dataset.

Existing metrics used to evaluate table structure recognition algorithms have shortcomings with regard to capturing text and empty cells alignment. In this paper, we build on prior work and propose a new metric - TEDS based IOU similarity (TEDS (IOU)) for table structure recognition which uses bounding boxes instead of text while simultaneously being robust against the above disadvantages. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our metric against previous metrics through various examples.

We present a validation dataset of newly-collected kitchen-based egocentric videos, manually annotated with highly detailed and interconnected ground-truth labels covering: recipe steps, fine-grained actions, ingredients with nutritional values, moving objects, and audio annotations. Importantly, all annotations are grounded in 3D through digital twinning of the scene, fixtures, object locations, and primed with gaze. Footage is collected from unscripted recordings in diverse home environments, making HDEPIC the first dataset collected in-the-wild but with detailed annotations matching those in controlled lab environments. We show the potential of our highly-detailed annotations through a challenging VQA benchmark of 26K questions assessing the capability to recognise recipes, ingredients, nutrition, fine-grained actions, 3D perception, object motion, and gaze direction. The powerful long-context Gemini Pro only achieves 38.5% on this benchmark, showcasing its difficulty and highlighting shortcomings in current VLMs. We additionally assess action recognition, sound recognition, and long-term video-object segmentation on HD-EPIC. HD-EPIC is 41 hours of video in 9 kitchens with digital twins of 413 kitchen fixtures, capturing 69 recipes, 59K fine-grained actions, 51K audio events, 20K object movements and 37K object masks lifted to 3D. On average, we have 263 annotations per minute of our unscripted videos.

Graph similarity computation (GSC) is to calculate the similarity between one pair of graphs, which is a fundamental problem with fruitful applications in the graph community. In GSC, graph edit distance (GED) and maximum common subgraph (MCS) are two important similarity metrics, both of which are NP-hard to compute. Instead of calculating the exact values, recent solutions resort to leveraging graph neural networks (GNNs) to learn data-driven models for the estimation of GED and MCS. Most of them are built on components involving node-level interactions crossing graphs, which engender vast computation overhead but are of little avail in effectiveness. In the paper, we present GraSP, a simple yet effective GSC approach for GED and MCS prediction. GraSP achieves high result efficacy through several key instruments: enhanced node features via positional encoding and a GNN model augmented by a gating mechanism, residual connections, as well as multi-scale pooling. Theoretically, GraSP can surpass the 1-WL test, indicating its high expressiveness. Empirically, extensive experiments comparing GraSP against 10 competitors on multiple widely adopted benchmark datasets showcase the superiority of GraSP over prior arts in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/HaoranZ99/GraSP.

Recent video generation models have shown promising results in producing high-quality video clips lasting several seconds. However, these models face challenges in generating long sequences that convey clear and informative events, limiting their ability to support coherent narrations. In this paper, we present a large-scale cooking video dataset designed to advance long-form narrative generation in the cooking domain. We validate the quality of our proposed dataset in terms of visual fidelity and textual caption accuracy using state-of-the-art Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and video generation models, respectively. We further introduce a Long Narrative Video Director to enhance both visual and semantic coherence in generated videos and emphasize the role of aligning visual embeddings to achieve improved overall video quality. Our method demonstrates substantial improvements in generating visually detailed and semantically aligned keyframes, supported by finetuning techniques that integrate text and image embeddings within the video generation process. Project page: https://videoauteur.github.io/

Reliably extracting tables from PDFs is essential for large-scale scientific data mining and knowledge base construction, yet existing evaluation approaches rely on rule-based metrics that fail to capture semantic equivalence of table content. We present a benchmarking framework based on synthetically generated PDFs with precise LaTeX ground truth, using tables sourced from arXiv to ensure realistic complexity and diversity. As our central methodological contribution, we apply LLM-as-a-judge for semantic table evaluation, integrated into a matching pipeline that accommodates inconsistencies in parser outputs. Through a human validation study comprising over 1,500 quality judgments on extracted table pairs, we show that LLM-based evaluation achieves substantially higher correlation with human judgment (Pearson r=0.93) compared to Tree Edit Distance-based Similarity (TEDS, r=0.68) and Grid Table Similarity (GriTS, r=0.70). Evaluating 21 contemporary PDF parsers across 100 synthetic documents containing 451 tables reveals significant performance disparities. Our results offer practical guidance for selecting parsers for tabular data extraction and establish a reproducible, scalable evaluation methodology for this critical task. Code and data: https://github.com/phorn1/pdf-parse-bench Metric study and human evaluation: https://github.com/phorn1/table-metric-study

The goal of product mapping is to decide, whether two listings from two different e-shops describe the same products. Existing datasets of matching and non-matching pairs of products, however, often suffer from incomplete product information or contain only very distant non-matching products. Therefore, while predictive models trained on these datasets achieve good results on them, in practice, they are unusable as they cannot distinguish very similar but non-matching pairs of products. This paper introduces two new datasets for product mapping: ProMapCz consisting of 1,495 Czech product pairs and ProMapEn consisting of 1,555 English product pairs of matching and non-matching products manually scraped from two pairs of e-shops. The datasets contain both images and textual descriptions of the products, including their specifications, making them one of the most complete datasets for product mapping. Additionally, the non-matching products were selected in two phases, creating two types of non-matches -- close non-matches and medium non-matches. Even the medium non-matches are pairs of products that are much more similar than non-matches in other datasets -- for example, they still need to have the same brand and similar name and price. After simple data preprocessing, several machine learning algorithms were trained on these and two the other datasets to demonstrate the complexity and completeness of ProMap datasets. ProMap datasets are presented as a golden standard for further research of product mapping filling the gaps in existing ones.

In this paper, we propose a multi-modal search engine for interior design that combines visual and textual queries. The goal of our engine is to retrieve interior objects, e.g. furniture or wall clocks, that share visual and aesthetic similarities with the query. Our search engine allows the user to take a photo of a room and retrieve with a high recall a list of items identical or visually similar to those present in the photo. Additionally, it allows to return other items that aesthetically and stylistically fit well together. To achieve this goal, our system blends the results obtained using textual and visual modalities. Thanks to this blending strategy, we increase the average style similarity score of the retrieved items by 11%. Our work is implemented as a Web-based application and it is planned to be opened to the public.

The Semmeldetector, is a machine learning application that utilizes object detection models to detect, classify and count baked goods in images. Our application allows commercial bakers to track unsold baked goods, which allows them to optimize production and increase resource efficiency. We compiled a dataset comprising 1151 images that distinguishes between 18 different types of baked goods to train our detection models. To facilitate model training, we used a Copy-Paste augmentation pipeline to expand our dataset. We trained the state-of-the-art object detection model YOLOv8 on our detection task. We tested the impact of different training data, model scale, and online image augmentation pipelines on model performance. Our overall best performing model, achieved an AP@0.5 of 89.1% on our test set. Based on our results, we conclude that machine learning can be a valuable tool even for unforeseen industries like bakeries, even with very limited datasets.

LLMs make it easy to rewrite text in any style, be it more polite, persuasive, or more positive. We present a large-scale study of evaluation metrics for style and attribute transfer with a focus on content preservation; meaning content not attributed to the style shift is preserved. The de facto evaluation approach uses lexical or semantic similarity metrics often between source sentences and rewrites. While these metrics are not designed to distinguish between style or content differences, empirical meta-evaluation shows a reasonable correlation to human judgment. In fact, recent works find that LLMs prompted as evaluators are only comparable to semantic similarity metrics, even though intuitively, the LLM approach should better fit the task. To investigate this discrepancy, we benchmark 8 metrics for evaluating content preservation on existing datasets and additionally construct a new test set that better aligns with the meta-evaluation aim. Indeed, we then find that the empirical conclusion aligns with the intuition: content preservation metrics for style/attribute transfer must be conditional on the style shift. To support this, we propose a new efficient zero-shot evaluation method using the likelihood of the next token. We hope our meta-evaluation can foster more research on evaluating content preservation metrics, and also to ensure fair evaluation of methods for conducting style transfer.

Hierarchical text classification (HTC) and extreme multi-label classification (XML) tasks face compounded challenges from complex label interdependencies, data sparsity, and extreme output dimensions. These challenges are exemplified in the European Food Safety Authority's FoodEx2 system-a standardized food classification framework essential for food consumption monitoring and contaminant exposure assessment across Europe. FoodEx2 coding transforms natural language food descriptions into a set of codes from multiple standardized hierarchies, but faces implementation barriers due to its complex structure. Given a food description (e.g., "organic yogurt''), the system identifies its base term ("yogurt''), all the applicable facet categories (e.g., "production method''), and then, every relevant facet descriptors to each category (e.g., "organic production''). While existing models perform adequately on well-balanced and semantically dense hierarchies, no work has been applied on the practical constraints imposed by the FoodEx2 system. The limited literature addressing such real-world scenarios further compounds these challenges. We propose FEAST (Food Embedding And Semantic Taxonomy), a novel retrieval-augmented framework that decomposes FoodEx2 classification into a three-stage approach: (1) base term identification, (2) multi-label facet prediction, and (3) facet descriptor assignment. By leveraging the system's hierarchical structure to guide training and performing deep metric learning, FEASTlearns discriminative embeddings that mitigate data sparsity and improve generalization on rare and fine-grained labels. Evaluated on the multilingual FoodEx2 benchmark, FEAST outperforms the prior European's CNN baseline F1 scores by 12-38 % on rare classes.

Text-to-SQL, the task of translating natural language questions into SQL queries, is part of various business processes. Its automation, which is an emerging challenge, will empower software practitioners to seamlessly interact with relational databases using natural language, thereby bridging the gap between business needs and software capabilities. In this paper, we consider Large Language Models (LLMs), which have achieved state of the art for various NLP tasks. Specifically, we benchmark Text-to-SQL performance, the evaluation methodologies, as well as input optimization (e.g., prompting). In light of the empirical observations that we have made, we propose two novel metrics that were designed to adequately measure the similarity between SQL queries. Overall, we share with the community various findings, notably on how to select the right LLM on Text-to-SQL tasks. We further demonstrate that a tree-based edit distance constitutes a reliable metric for assessing the similarity between generated SQL queries and the oracle for benchmarking Text2SQL approaches. This metric is important as it relieves researchers from the need to perform computationally expensive experiments such as executing generated queries as done in prior works. Our work implements financial domain use cases and, therefore contributes to the advancement of Text2SQL systems and their practical adoption in this domain.

Understanding causal relationships between machines is crucial for fault diagnosis and optimization in manufacturing processes. Real-world datasets frequently exhibit up to 90% missing data and high dimensionality from hundreds of sensors. These datasets also include domain-specific expert knowledge and chronological order information, reflecting the recording order across different machines, which is pivotal for discerning causal relationships within the manufacturing data. However, previous methods for handling missing data in scenarios akin to real-world conditions have not been able to effectively utilize expert knowledge. Conversely, prior methods that can incorporate expert knowledge struggle with datasets that exhibit missing values. Therefore, we propose COKE to construct causal graphs in manufacturing datasets by leveraging expert knowledge and chronological order among sensors without imputing missing data. Utilizing the characteristics of the recipe, we maximize the use of samples with missing values, derive embeddings from intersections with an initial graph that incorporates expert knowledge and chronological order, and create a sensor ordering graph. The graph-generating process has been optimized by an actor-critic architecture to obtain a final graph that has a maximum reward. Experimental evaluations in diverse settings of sensor quantities and missing proportions demonstrate that our approach compared with the benchmark methods shows an average improvement of 39.9% in the F1-score. Moreover, the F1-score improvement can reach 62.6% when considering the configuration similar to real-world datasets, and 85.0% in real-world semiconductor datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/OuTingYun/COKE.

Consumer research costs companies billions annually yet suffers from panel biases and limited scale. Large language models (LLMs) offer an alternative by simulating synthetic consumers, but produce unrealistic response distributions when asked directly for numerical ratings. We present semantic similarity rating (SSR), a method that elicits textual responses from LLMs and maps these to Likert distributions using embedding similarity to reference statements. Testing on an extensive dataset comprising 57 personal care product surveys conducted by a leading corporation in that market (9,300 human responses), SSR achieves 90% of human test-retest reliability while maintaining realistic response distributions (KS similarity > 0.85). Additionally, these synthetic respondents provide rich qualitative feedback explaining their ratings. This framework enables scalable consumer research simulations while preserving traditional survey metrics and interpretability.

Modern retrieval pipelines increasingly serve downstream consumers like retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and autonomous agents that need more than a scalar relevance score. A reranker that only tells the caller "how relevant" forces the agent to dump entire documents into the language-model context, wasting tokens on tangential passages and boilerplate. We introduce Prism-Reranker, a family of reranker models built on Qwen3.5 at four sizes (0.8B, 2B, 4B, 9B) that goes beyond scalar scoring. In addition to the standard yes/no relevance judgement, whenever the verdict is yes the model emits (i) a contribution statement summarizing how the document helps the query, and (ii) an evidence passage: a self-contained rewrite that preserves every query-relevant signal while discarding noise. Prism-Reranker is trained with a hybrid objective combining point-wise distillation from a strong commercial reranker API with supervised fine-tuning on contribution and evidence targets. We curate training data from KaLM-Embedding's open-source aggregation, augmented with real web documents retrieved via commercial search APIs for open-domain queries and LLM-synthesized variants, and rewrite a portion of queries into keyword-style reformulations to adapt the model to agent-issued traffic. To reconcile inconsistent labels across open corpora and obtain crisp binary supervision, we relabel data with an LLM-as-Judge ensemble aggregating votes from five frontier LLMs. On a QA subset of BEIR and on an LLM-judged evaluation of contribution and evidence quality, Prism-Reranker attains solid results across all four sizes. We further show that the same recipe extends existing LLM-based rerankers, augmenting Qwen3-Reranker-4B with contribution and evidence capabilities while improving its average BEIR-QA NDCG@10 by +1.54 over the base model. Model weights, training recipe, and evaluation suite are released.

Outfits in online fashion data are composed of items of many different types (e.g. top, bottom, shoes) that share some stylistic relationship with one another. A representation for building outfits requires a method that can learn both notions of similarity (for example, when two tops are interchangeable) and compatibility (items of possibly different type that can go together in an outfit). This paper presents an approach to learning an image embedding that respects item type, and jointly learns notions of item similarity and compatibility in an end-to-end model. To evaluate the learned representation, we crawled 68,306 outfits created by users on the Polyvore website. Our approach obtains 3-5% improvement over the state-of-the-art on outfit compatibility prediction and fill-in-the-blank tasks using our dataset, as well as an established smaller dataset, while supporting a variety of useful queries.

Online reviews in the form of user-generated content (UGC) significantly impact consumer decision-making. However, the pervasive issue of not only human fake content but also machine-generated content challenges UGC's reliability. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) may pave the way to fabricate indistinguishable fake generated content at a much lower cost. Leveraging OpenAI's GPT-4-Turbo and DALL-E-2 models, we craft AiGen-FoodReview, a multi-modal dataset of 20,144 restaurant review-image pairs divided into authentic and machine-generated. We explore unimodal and multimodal detection models, achieving 99.80% multimodal accuracy with FLAVA. We use attributes from readability and photographic theories to score reviews and images, respectively, demonstrating their utility as hand-crafted features in scalable and interpretable detection models, with comparable performance. The paper contributes by open-sourcing the dataset and releasing fake review detectors, recommending its use in unimodal and multimodal fake review detection tasks, and evaluating linguistic and visual features in synthetic versus authentic data.

Dietary intake estimation plays a crucial role in understanding the nutritional habits of individuals and populations, aiding in the prevention and management of diet-related health issues. Accurate estimation requires comprehensive datasets of food scenes, including images, segmentation masks, and accompanying dietary intake metadata. In this paper, we introduce NutritionVerse-Real, an open access manually collected 2D food scene dataset for dietary intake estimation with 889 images of 251 distinct dishes and 45 unique food types. The NutritionVerse-Real dataset was created by manually collecting images of food scenes in real life, measuring the weight of every ingredient and computing the associated dietary content of each dish using the ingredient weights and nutritional information from the food packaging or the Canada Nutrient File. Segmentation masks were then generated through human labelling of the images. We provide further analysis on the data diversity to highlight potential biases when using this data to develop models for dietary intake estimation. NutritionVerse-Real is publicly available at https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/nutritionverse/nutritionverse-real as part of an open initiative to accelerate machine learning for dietary sensing.

DORAEMON is an open-source PyTorch library that unifies visual object modeling and representation learning across diverse scales. A single YAML-driven workflow covers classification, retrieval and metric learning; more than 1000 pretrained backbones are exposed through a timm-compatible interface, together with modular losses, augmentations and distributed-training utilities. Reproducible recipes match or exceed reference results on ImageNet-1K, MS-Celeb-1M and Stanford online products, while one-command export to ONNX or HuggingFace bridges research and deployment. By consolidating datasets, models, and training techniques into one platform, DORAEMON offers a scalable foundation for rapid experimentation in visual recognition and representation learning, enabling efficient transfer of research advances to real-world applications. The repository is available at https://github.com/wuji3/DORAEMON.

Fairness and relevance are two important aspects of recommender systems (RSs). Typically, they are evaluated either (i) separately by individual measures of fairness and relevance, or (ii) jointly using a single measure that accounts for fairness with respect to relevance. However, approach (i) often does not provide a reliable joint estimate of the goodness of the models, as it has two different best models: one for fairness and another for relevance. Approach (ii) is also problematic because these measures tend to be ad-hoc and do not relate well to traditional relevance measures, like NDCG. Motivated by this, we present a new approach for jointly evaluating fairness and relevance in RSs: Distance to Pareto Frontier (DPFR). Given some user-item interaction data, we compute their Pareto frontier for a pair of existing relevance and fairness measures, and then use the distance from the frontier as a measure of the jointly achievable fairness and relevance. Our approach is modular and intuitive as it can be computed with existing measures. Experiments with 4 RS models, 3 re-ranking strategies, and 6 datasets show that existing metrics have inconsistent associations with our Pareto-optimal solution, making DPFR a more robust and theoretically well-founded joint measure for assessing fairness and relevance. Our code: https://github.com/theresiavr/DPFR-recsys-evaluation

Latent variable collaborative filtering methods have been a standard approach to modelling user-click interactions due to their simplicity and effectiveness. However, there is limited work on analyzing the mathematical properties of these methods in particular on preventing the overfitting towards the identity, and such methods typically utilize loss functions that overlook the geometry between items. In this work, we introduce a notion of generalization gap in collaborative filtering and analyze this with respect to latent collaborative filtering models. We present a geometric upper bound that gives rise to loss functions, and a way to meaningfully utilize the geometry of item-metadata to improve recommendations. We show how these losses can be minimized and gives the recipe to a new latent collaborative filtering algorithm, which we refer to as GeoCF, due to the geometric nature of our results. We then show experimentally that our proposed GeoCF algorithm can outperform other all existing methods on the Movielens20M and Netflix datasets, as well as two large-scale internal datasets. In summary, our work proposes a theoretically sound method which paves a way to better understand generalization of collaborative filtering at large.

We propose Image Content Appeal Assessment (ICAA), a novel metric that quantifies the level of positive interest an image's content generates for viewers, such as the appeal of food in a photograph. This is fundamentally different from traditional Image-Aesthetics Assessment (IAA), which judges an image's artistic quality. While previous studies often confuse the concepts of ``aesthetics'' and ``appeal,'' our work addresses this by being the first to study ICAA explicitly. To do this, we propose a novel system that automates dataset creation and implements algorithms to estimate and boost content appeal. We use our pipeline to generate two large-scale datasets (70K+ images each) in diverse domains (food and room interior design) to train our models, which revealed little correlation between content appeal and aesthetics. Our user study, with more than 76% of participants preferring the appeal-enhanced images, confirms that our appeal ratings accurately reflect user preferences, establishing ICAA as a unique evaluative criterion. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/SherryXTChen/AID-Appeal.

Recent advancements in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have revolutionized general visual understanding. However, their application in the food domain remains constrained by benchmarks that rely on coarse-grained categories, single-view imagery, and inaccurate metadata. To bridge this gap, we introduce DiningBench, a hierarchical, multi-view benchmark designed to evaluate VLMs across three levels of cognitive complexity: Fine-Grained Classification, Nutrition Estimation, and Visual Question Answering. Unlike previous datasets, DiningBench comprises 3,021 distinct dishes with an average of 5.27 images per entry, incorporating fine-grained "hard" negatives from identical menus and rigorous, verification-based nutritional data. We conduct an extensive evaluation of 29 state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary models. Our experiments reveal that while current VLMs excel at general reasoning, they struggle significantly with fine-grained visual discrimination and precise nutritional reasoning. Furthermore, we systematically investigate the impact of multi-view inputs and Chain-of-Thought reasoning, identifying five primary failure modes. DiningBench serves as a challenging testbed to drive the next generation of food-centric VLM research. All codes are released in https://github.com/meituan/DiningBench.

Over the past decade, tremendous progress has been made in Recommender Systems (RecSys) for well-known tasks such as next-item and next-basket prediction. On the other hand, the recently proposed next-period recommendation (NPR) task is not covered as much. Current works about NPR are mostly based around distinct problem formulations, methods, and proprietary datasets, making solutions difficult to reproduce. In this article, we aim to fill the gap in RecSys methods evaluation on the NPR task using publicly available datasets and (1) introduce the TTRS, a large-scale financial transactions dataset suitable for RecSys methods evaluation; (2) benchmark popular RecSys approaches on several datasets for the NPR task. When performing our analysis, we found a strong repetitive consumption pattern in several real-world datasets. With this setup, our results suggest that the repetitive nature of data is still hard to generalize for the evaluated RecSys methods, and novel item prediction performance is still questionable.

Monitoring population-level changes in diet could be useful for education and for implementing interventions to improve health. Research has shown that data from social media sources can be used for monitoring dietary behavior. We propose a scrape-by-location methodology to create food image datasets from Instagram posts. We used it to collect 3.56 million images over a period of 20 days in March 2019. We also propose a scrape-by-keywords methodology and used it to scrape ~30,000 images and their captions of 38 Kenyan food types. We publish two datasets of 104,000 and 8,174 image/caption pairs, respectively. With the first dataset, Kenya104K, we train a Kenyan Food Classifier, called KenyanFC, to distinguish Kenyan food from non-food images posted in Kenya. We used the second dataset, KenyanFood13, to train a classifier KenyanFTR, short for Kenyan Food Type Recognizer, to recognize 13 popular food types in Kenya. The KenyanFTR is a multimodal deep neural network that can identify 13 types of Kenyan foods using both images and their corresponding captions. Experiments show that the average top-1 accuracy of KenyanFC is 99% over 10,400 tested Instagram images and of KenyanFTR is 81% over 8,174 tested data points. Ablation studies show that three of the 13 food types are particularly difficult to categorize based on image content only and that adding analysis of captions to the image analysis yields a classifier that is 9 percent points more accurate than a classifier that relies only on images. Our food trend analysis revealed that cakes and roasted meats were the most popular foods in photographs on Instagram in Kenya in March 2019.

A critical challenge in recommender systems is to establish reliable relationships between offline and online metrics that predict real-world performance. Motivated by recent advances in Pareto front approximation, we introduce a pragmatic strategy for identifying offline metrics that align with online impact. A key advantage of this approach is its ability to simultaneously serve multiple test groups, each with distinct offline performance metrics, in an online experiment controlled by a single model. The method is model-agnostic for systems with a neural network backbone, enabling broad applicability across architectures and domains. We validate the strategy through a large-scale online experiment in the field of session-based recommender systems on the OTTO e-commerce platform. The online experiment identifies significant alignments between offline metrics and real-word click-through rate, post-click conversion rate and units sold. Our strategy provides industry practitioners with a valuable tool for understanding offline-to-online metric relationships and making informed, data-driven decisions.

Fairness is an emerging and challenging topic in recommender systems. In recent years, various ways of evaluating and therefore improving fairness have emerged. In this study, we examine existing evaluation measures of fairness in recommender systems. Specifically, we focus solely on exposure-based fairness measures of individual items that aim to quantify the disparity in how individual items are recommended to users, separate from item relevance to users. We gather all such measures and we critically analyse their theoretical properties. We identify a series of limitations in each of them, which collectively may render the affected measures hard or impossible to interpret, to compute, or to use for comparing recommendations. We resolve these limitations by redefining or correcting the affected measures, or we argue why certain limitations cannot be resolved. We further perform a comprehensive empirical analysis of both the original and our corrected versions of these fairness measures, using real-world and synthetic datasets. Our analysis provides novel insights into the relationship between measures based on different fairness concepts, and different levels of measure sensitivity and strictness. We conclude with practical suggestions of which fairness measures should be used and when. Our code is publicly available. To our knowledge, this is the first critical comparison of individual item fairness measures in recommender systems.

Randomly-hashed item ids are used ubiquitously in recommendation models. However, the learned representations from random hashing prevents generalization across similar items, causing problems of learning unseen and long-tail items, especially when item corpus is large, power-law distributed, and evolving dynamically. In this paper, we propose using content-derived features as a replacement for random ids. We show that simply replacing ID features with content-based embeddings can cause a drop in quality due to reduced memorization capability. To strike a good balance of memorization and generalization, we propose to use Semantic IDs -- a compact discrete item representation learned from frozen content embeddings using RQ-VAE that captures the hierarchy of concepts in items -- as a replacement for random item ids. Similar to content embeddings, the compactness of Semantic IDs poses a problem of easy adaption in recommendation models. We propose novel methods for adapting Semantic IDs in industry-scale ranking models, through hashing sub-pieces of of the Semantic-ID sequences. In particular, we find that the SentencePiece model that is commonly used in LLM tokenization outperforms manually crafted pieces such as N-grams. To the end, we evaluate our approaches in a real-world ranking model for YouTube recommendations. Our experiments demonstrate that Semantic IDs can replace the direct use of video IDs by improving the generalization ability on new and long-tail item slices without sacrificing overall model quality.

In recent years, the scaling laws of recommendation models have attracted increasing attention, which govern the relationship between performance and parameters/FLOPs of recommenders. Currently, there are three mainstream architectures for achieving scaling in recommendation models, namely attention-based, TokenMixer-based, and factorization-machine-based methods, which exhibit fundamental differences in both design philosophy and architectural structure. In this paper, we propose a unified scaling architecture for recommendation systems, namely UniMixer, to improve scaling efficiency and establish a unified theoretical framework that unifies the mainstream scaling blocks. By transforming the rule-based TokenMixer to an equivalent parameterized structure, we construct a generalized parameterized feature mixing module that allows the token mixing patterns to be optimized and learned during model training. Meanwhile, the generalized parameterized token mixing removes the constraint in TokenMixer that requires the number of heads to be equal to the number of tokens. Furthermore, we establish a unified scaling module design framework for recommender systems, which bridges the connections among attention-based, TokenMixer-based, and factorization-machine-based methods. To further boost scaling ROI, a lightweight UniMixing module is designed, UniMixing-Lite, which further compresses the model parameters and computational cost while significantly improve the model performance. The scaling curves are shown in the following figure. Extensive offline and online experiments are conducted to verify the superior scaling abilities of UniMixer.

Learnable embedding vector is one of the most important applications in machine learning, and is widely used in various database-related domains. However, the high dimensionality of sparse data in recommendation tasks and the huge volume of corpus in retrieval-related tasks lead to a large memory consumption of the embedding table, which poses a great challenge to the training and deployment of models. Recent research has proposed various methods to compress the embeddings at the cost of a slight decrease in model quality or the introduction of other overheads. Nevertheless, the relative performance of these methods remains unclear. Existing experimental comparisons only cover a subset of these methods and focus on limited metrics. In this paper, we perform a comprehensive comparative analysis and experimental evaluation of embedding compression. We introduce a new taxonomy that categorizes these techniques based on their characteristics and methodologies, and further develop a modular benchmarking framework that integrates 14 representative methods. Under a uniform test environment, our benchmark fairly evaluates each approach, presents their strengths and weaknesses under different memory budgets, and recommends the best method based on the use case. In addition to providing useful guidelines, our study also uncovers the limitations of current methods and suggests potential directions for future research.

We present a culturally-grounded multimodal dataset of 1,060 traditional recipes crowdsourced from rural communities across remote regions of Eastern India, spanning 10 endangered languages. These recipes, rich in linguistic and cultural nuance, were collected using a mobile interface designed for contributors with low digital literacy. Endangered Language Recipes (ELR)-1000 -- captures not only culinary practices but also the socio-cultural context embedded in indigenous food traditions. We evaluate the performance of several state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) on translating these recipes into English and find the following: despite the models' capabilities, they struggle with low-resource, culturally-specific language. However, we observe that providing targeted context -- including background information about the languages, translation examples, and guidelines for cultural preservation -- leads to significant improvements in translation quality. Our results underscore the need for benchmarks that cater to underrepresented languages and domains to advance equitable and culturally-aware language technologies. As part of this work, we release the ELR-1000 dataset to the NLP community, hoping it motivates the development of language technologies for endangered languages.

We present BASKET, a large-scale basketball video dataset for fine-grained skill estimation. BASKET contains 4,477 hours of video capturing 32,232 basketball players from all over the world. Compared to prior skill estimation datasets, our dataset includes a massive number of skilled participants with unprecedented diversity in terms of gender, age, skill level, geographical location, etc. BASKET includes 20 fine-grained basketball skills, challenging modern video recognition models to capture the intricate nuances of player skill through in-depth video analysis. Given a long highlight video (8-10 minutes) of a particular player, the model needs to predict the skill level (e.g., excellent, good, average, fair, poor) for each of the 20 basketball skills. Our empirical analysis reveals that the current state-of-the-art video models struggle with this task, significantly lagging behind the human baseline. We believe that BASKET could be a useful resource for developing new video models with advanced long-range, fine-grained recognition capabilities. In addition, we hope that our dataset will be useful for domain-specific applications such as fair basketball scouting, personalized player development, and many others. Dataset and code are available at https://github.com/yulupan00/BASKET.

Understanding geometric properties of natural language processing models' latent spaces allows the manipulation of these properties for improved performance on downstream tasks. One such property is the amount of data spread in a model's latent space, or how fully the available latent space is being used. In this work, we define data spread and demonstrate that the commonly used measures of data spread, Average Cosine Similarity and a partition function min/max ratio I(V), do not provide reliable metrics to compare the use of latent space across models. We propose and examine eight alternative measures of data spread, all but one of which improve over these current metrics when applied to seven synthetic data distributions. Of our proposed measures, we recommend one principal component-based measure and one entropy-based measure that provide reliable, relative measures of spread and can be used to compare models of different sizes and dimensionalities.

Music is essential when editing videos, but selecting music manually is difficult and time-consuming. Thus, we seek to automatically generate background music tracks given video input. This is a challenging task since it requires music-video datasets, efficient architectures for video-to-music generation, and reasonable metrics, none of which currently exist. To close this gap, we introduce a complete recipe including dataset, benchmark model, and evaluation metric for video background music generation. We present SymMV, a video and symbolic music dataset with various musical annotations. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first video-music dataset with rich musical annotations. We also propose a benchmark video background music generation framework named V-MusProd, which utilizes music priors of chords, melody, and accompaniment along with video-music relations of semantic, color, and motion features. To address the lack of objective metrics for video-music correspondence, we design a retrieval-based metric VMCP built upon a powerful video-music representation learning model. Experiments show that with our dataset, V-MusProd outperforms the state-of-the-art method in both music quality and correspondence with videos. We believe our dataset, benchmark model, and evaluation metric will boost the development of video background music generation. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/zhuole1025/SymMV.

Given appropriate representations of the semantic relations between carpenter and wood and between mason and stone (for example, vectors in a vector space model), a suitable algorithm should be able to recognize that these relations are highly similar (carpenter is to wood as mason is to stone; the relations are analogous). Likewise, with representations of dog, house, and kennel, an algorithm should be able to recognize that the semantic composition of dog and house, dog house, is highly similar to kennel (dog house and kennel are synonymous). It seems that these two tasks, recognizing relations and compositions, are closely connected. However, up to now, the best models for relations are significantly different from the best models for compositions. In this paper, we introduce a dual-space model that unifies these two tasks. This model matches the performance of the best previous models for relations and compositions. The dual-space model consists of a space for measuring domain similarity and a space for measuring function similarity. Carpenter and wood share the same domain, the domain of carpentry. Mason and stone share the same domain, the domain of masonry. Carpenter and mason share the same function, the function of artisans. Wood and stone share the same function, the function of materials. In the composition dog house, kennel has some domain overlap with both dog and house (the domains of pets and buildings). The function of kennel is similar to the function of house (the function of shelters). By combining domain and function similarities in various ways, we can model relations, compositions, and other aspects of semantics.

There is an increasing adoption of machine learning for encoding data into vectors to serve online recommendation and search use cases. As a result, recent data management systems propose augmenting query processing with online vector similarity search. In this work, we explore vector similarity search in the context of Knowledge Graphs (KGs). Motivated by the tasks of finding related KG queries and entities for past KG query workloads, we focus on hybrid vector similarity search (hybrid queries for short) where part of the query corresponds to vector similarity search and part of the query corresponds to predicates over relational attributes associated with the underlying data vectors. For example, given past KG queries for a song entity, we want to construct new queries for new song entities whose vector representations are close to the vector representation of the entity in the past KG query. But entities in a KG also have non-vector attributes such as a song associated with an artist, a genre, and a release date. Therefore, suggested entities must also satisfy query predicates over non-vector attributes beyond a vector-based similarity predicate. While these tasks are central to KGs, our contributions are generally applicable to hybrid queries. In contrast to prior works that optimize online queries, we focus on enabling efficient batch processing of past hybrid query workloads. We present our system, HQI, for high-throughput batch processing of hybrid queries. We introduce a workload-aware vector data partitioning scheme to tailor the vector index layout to the given workload and describe a multi-query optimization technique to reduce the overhead of vector similarity computations. We evaluate our methods on industrial workloads and demonstrate that HQI yields a 31x improvement in throughput for finding related KG queries compared to existing hybrid query processing approaches.

The escalating global concern over extensive food wastage necessitates innovative solutions to foster a net-zero lifestyle and reduce emissions. The LILA home composter presents a convenient means of recycling kitchen scraps and daily food waste into nutrient-rich, high-quality compost. To capture the nutritional information of the produced compost, we have created and annotated a large high-resolution image dataset of kitchen food waste with segmentation masks of 19 nutrition-rich categories. Leveraging this dataset, we benchmarked four state-of-the-art semantic segmentation models on food waste segmentation, contributing to the assessment of compost quality of Nitrogen, Phosphorus, or Potassium. The experiments demonstrate promising results of using segmentation models to discern food waste produced in our daily lives. Based on the experiments, SegFormer, utilizing MIT-B5 backbone, yields the best performance with a mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) of 67.09. Class-based results are also provided to facilitate further analysis of different food waste classes.

Traditional document similarity measures provide a coarse-grained distinction between similar and dissimilar documents. Typically, they do not consider in what aspects two documents are similar. This limits the granularity of applications like recommender systems that rely on document similarity. In this paper, we extend similarity with aspect information by performing a pairwise document classification task. We evaluate our aspect-based document similarity for research papers. Paper citations indicate the aspect-based similarity, i.e., the section title in which a citation occurs acts as a label for the pair of citing and cited paper. We apply a series of Transformer models such as RoBERTa, ELECTRA, XLNet, and BERT variations and compare them to an LSTM baseline. We perform our experiments on two newly constructed datasets of 172,073 research paper pairs from the ACL Anthology and CORD-19 corpus. Our results show SciBERT as the best performing system. A qualitative examination validates our quantitative results. Our findings motivate future research of aspect-based document similarity and the development of a recommender system based on the evaluated techniques. We make our datasets, code, and trained models publicly available.

Cross-modal metric learning is a prominent research topic that bridges the semantic heterogeneity between vision and language. Existing methods frequently utilize simple cosine or complex distance metrics to transform the pairwise features into a similarity score, which suffers from an inadequate or inefficient capability for distance measurements. Consequently, we propose a Generalized Structural Sparse Function to dynamically capture thorough and powerful relationships across modalities for pair-wise similarity learning while remaining concise but efficient. Specifically, the distance metric delicately encapsulates two formats of diagonal and block-diagonal terms, automatically distinguishing and highlighting the cross-channel relevancy and dependency inside a structured and organized topology. Hence, it thereby empowers itself to adapt to the optimal matching patterns between the paired features and reaches a sweet spot between model complexity and capability. Extensive experiments on cross-modal and two extra uni-modal retrieval tasks (image-text retrieval, person re-identification, fine-grained image retrieval) have validated its superiority and flexibility over various popular retrieval frameworks. More importantly, we further discover that it can be seamlessly incorporated into multiple application scenarios, and demonstrates promising prospects from Attention Mechanism to Knowledge Distillation in a plug-and-play manner. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/Paranioar/GSSF.

Given a set of dissimilarity measurements amongst data points, determining what metric representation is most "consistent" with the input measurements or the metric that best captures the relevant geometric features of the data is a key step in many machine learning algorithms. Existing methods are restricted to specific kinds of metrics or small problem sizes because of the large number of metric constraints in such problems. In this paper, we provide an active set algorithm, Project and Forget, that uses Bregman projections, to solve metric constrained problems with many (possibly exponentially) inequality constraints. We provide a theoretical analysis of Project and Forget and prove that our algorithm converges to the global optimal solution and that the L_2 distance of the current iterate to the optimal solution decays asymptotically at an exponential rate. We demonstrate that using our method we can solve large problem instances of three types of metric constrained problems: general weight correlation clustering, metric nearness, and metric learning; in each case, out-performing the state of the art methods with respect to CPU times and problem sizes.

Entity resolution (record linkage, microclustering) systems are notoriously difficult to evaluate. Looking for a needle in a haystack, traditional evaluation methods use sophisticated, application-specific sampling schemes to find matching pairs of records among an immense number of non-matches. We propose an alternative that facilitates the creation of representative, reusable benchmark data sets without necessitating complex sampling schemes. These benchmark data sets can then be used for model training and a variety of evaluation tasks. Specifically, we propose an entity-centric data labeling methodology that integrates with a unified framework for monitoring summary statistics, estimating key performance metrics such as cluster and pairwise precision and recall, and analyzing root causes for errors. We validate the framework in an application to inventor name disambiguation and through simulation studies. Software: https://github.com/OlivierBinette/er-evaluation/

Failure of machine learning models to generalize to new data is a core problem limiting the reliability of AI systems, partly due to the lack of simple and robust methods for comparing new data to the original training dataset. We propose a standardized approach for assessing data similarity in a model-agnostic manner by constructing a supervised autoencoder for generalizability estimation (SAGE). We compare points in a low-dimensional embedded latent space, defining empirical probability measures for k-Nearest Neighbors (kNN) distance, reconstruction of inputs and task-based performance. As proof of concept for classification tasks, we use MNIST and CIFAR-10 to demonstrate how an ensemble output probability score can separate deformed images from a mixture of typical test examples, and how this SAGE score is robust to transformations of increasing severity. As further proof of concept, we extend this approach to a regression task using non-imaging data (UCI Abalone). In all cases, we show that out-of-the-box model performance increases after SAGE score filtering, even when applied to data from the model's own training and test datasets. Our out-of-distribution scoring method can be introduced during several steps of model construction and assessment, leading to future improvements in responsible deep learning implementation.

First-person vision is gaining interest as it offers a unique viewpoint on people's interaction with objects, their attention, and even intention. However, progress in this challenging domain has been relatively slow due to the lack of sufficiently large datasets. In this paper, we introduce EPIC-KITCHENS, a large-scale egocentric video benchmark recorded by 32 participants in their native kitchen environments. Our videos depict nonscripted daily activities: we simply asked each participant to start recording every time they entered their kitchen. Recording took place in 4 cities (in North America and Europe) by participants belonging to 10 different nationalities, resulting in highly diverse cooking styles. Our dataset features 55 hours of video consisting of 11.5M frames, which we densely labeled for a total of 39.6K action segments and 454.3K object bounding boxes. Our annotation is unique in that we had the participants narrate their own videos (after recording), thus reflecting true intention, and we crowd-sourced ground-truths based on these. We describe our object, action and anticipation challenges, and evaluate several baselines over two test splits, seen and unseen kitchens. Dataset and Project page: http://epic-kitchens.github.io

This study explores artificial visual creativity, focusing on ChatGPT's ability to generate new images intentionally pastiching original artworks such as paintings, drawings, sculptures and installations. The process involved twelve artists from Romania, Bulgaria, France, Austria, and the United Kingdom, each invited to contribute with three of their artworks and to grade and comment on the AI-generated versions. The analysis combines human evaluation with computational methods aimed at detecting visual and stylistic similarities or divergences between the original works and their AI-produced renditions. The results point to a significant gap between color and texture-based similarity and compositional, conceptual, and perceptual one. Consequently, we advocate for the use of a "style transfer dashboard" of complementary metrics to evaluate the similarity between pastiches and originals, rather than using a single style metric. The artists' comments revealed limitations of ChatGPT's pastiches after contemporary artworks, which were perceived by the authors of the originals as lacking dimensionality, context, and intentional sense, and seeming more of a paraphrase or an approximate quotation rather than as a valuable, emotion-evoking artwork.

The development of data-dependent heuristics and representations for biological sequences that reflect their evolutionary distance is critical for large-scale biological research. However, popular machine learning approaches, based on continuous Euclidean spaces, have struggled with the discrete combinatorial formulation of the edit distance that models evolution and the hierarchical relationship that characterises real-world datasets. We present Neural Distance Embeddings (NeuroSEED), a general framework to embed sequences in geometric vector spaces, and illustrate the effectiveness of the hyperbolic space that captures the hierarchical structure and provides an average 22% reduction in embedding RMSE against the best competing geometry. The capacity of the framework and the significance of these improvements are then demonstrated devising supervised and unsupervised NeuroSEED approaches to multiple core tasks in bioinformatics. Benchmarked with common baselines, the proposed approaches display significant accuracy and/or runtime improvements on real-world datasets. As an example for hierarchical clustering, the proposed pretrained and from-scratch methods match the quality of competing baselines with 30x and 15x runtime reduction, respectively.

Sequential recommendation has increasingly shifted toward generative recommenders that combine sequential patterns with semantic item information. Yet these methods are often evaluated on a small set of widely used benchmarks, raising a key question: do these benchmarks actually require the advanced modeling capabilities that modern generative recommenders claim to provide? We conduct a benchmark audit with an intentionally simple graph heuristic. Starting from only the last one or two interacted items, it retrieves candidates from a few-hop item-transition graph and ranks them by item-feature similarity. Despite using no sequence encoder, generative objective, or training, this heuristic matches or outperforms many modern baselines, with relative NDCG@10 improvements of 38.10% and 44.18% over the best competing baseline on Amazon Review Sports and CDs. We show that this behavior reflects shortcut solvability rather than an artifact of one heuristic. We identify three shortcut structures that can make next-item prediction easier than expected: low-branching local transitions, feature-smooth transitions, and limited dependence on long user histories. These shortcuts need not appear together; even one or two strong signals can make simple local retrieval highly competitive, while weakening them makes the benefits of more sophisticated models clearer. Across 14 datasets, model rankings vary substantially with dataset properties, yet the heuristic remains competitive on 10 of them. Our findings suggest that strong performance on standard benchmarks does not always demonstrate advanced sequential, semantic, or generative modeling ability. We call for more careful dataset selection and dataset-level diagnostic analysis when using benchmarks to support claims about new recommendation models.

Food is a rich and varied dimension of cultural heritage, crucial to both individuals and social groups. To bridge the gap in the literature on the often-overlooked regional diversity in this domain, we introduce FoodieQA, a manually curated, fine-grained image-text dataset capturing the intricate features of food cultures across various regions in China. We evaluate vision-language Models (VLMs) and large language models (LLMs) on newly collected, unseen food images and corresponding questions. FoodieQA comprises three multiple-choice question-answering tasks where models need to answer questions based on multiple images, a single image, and text-only descriptions, respectively. While LLMs excel at text-based question answering, surpassing human accuracy, the open-sourced VLMs still fall short by 41\% on multi-image and 21\% on single-image VQA tasks, although closed-weights models perform closer to human levels (within 10\%). Our findings highlight that understanding food and its cultural implications remains a challenging and under-explored direction.

This paper analyzes Cross-Entropy (CE) loss in knowledge distillation (KD) for recommender systems. KD for recommender systems targets at distilling rankings, especially among items most likely to be preferred, and can only be computed on a small subset of items. Considering these features, we reveal the connection between CE loss and NDCG in the field of KD. We prove that when performing KD on an item subset, minimizing CE loss maximizes the lower bound of NDCG, only if an assumption of closure is satisfied. It requires that the item subset consists of the student's top items. However, this contradicts our goal of distilling rankings of the teacher's top items. We empirically demonstrate the vast gap between these two kinds of top items. To bridge the gap between our goal and theoretical support, we propose Rejuvenated Cross-Entropy for Knowledge Distillation (RCE-KD). It splits the top items given by the teacher into two subsets based on whether they are highly ranked by the student. For the subset that defies the condition, a sampling strategy is devised to use teacher-student collaboration to approximate our assumption of closure. We also combine the losses on the two subsets adaptively. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Our code is available at https://github.com/BDML-lab/RCE-KD.

Improving the quality of search results can significantly enhance users experience and engagement with search engines. In spite of several recent advancements in the fields of machine learning and data mining, correctly classifying items for a particular user search query has been a long-standing challenge, which still has a large room for improvement. This paper introduces the "Shopping Queries Dataset", a large dataset of difficult Amazon search queries and results, publicly released with the aim of fostering research in improving the quality of search results. The dataset contains around 130 thousand unique queries and 2.6 million manually labeled (query,product) relevance judgements. The dataset is multilingual with queries in English, Japanese, and Spanish. The Shopping Queries Dataset is being used in one of the KDDCup'22 challenges. In this paper, we describe the dataset and present three evaluation tasks along with baseline results: (i) ranking the results list, (ii) classifying product results into relevance categories, and (iii) identifying substitute products for a given query. We anticipate that this data will become the gold standard for future research in the topic of product search.

Modeling customer shopping intentions is a crucial task for e-commerce, as it directly impacts user experience and engagement. Thus, accurately understanding customer preferences is essential for providing personalized recommendations. Session-based recommendation, which utilizes customer session data to predict their next interaction, has become increasingly popular. However, existing session datasets have limitations in terms of item attributes, user diversity, and dataset scale. As a result, they cannot comprehensively capture the spectrum of user behaviors and preferences. To bridge this gap, we present the Amazon Multilingual Multi-locale Shopping Session Dataset, namely Amazon-M2. It is the first multilingual dataset consisting of millions of user sessions from six different locales, where the major languages of products are English, German, Japanese, French, Italian, and Spanish. Remarkably, the dataset can help us enhance personalization and understanding of user preferences, which can benefit various existing tasks as well as enable new tasks. To test the potential of the dataset, we introduce three tasks in this work: (1) next-product recommendation, (2) next-product recommendation with domain shifts, and (3) next-product title generation. With the above tasks, we benchmark a range of algorithms on our proposed dataset, drawing new insights for further research and practice. In addition, based on the proposed dataset and tasks, we hosted a competition in the KDD CUP 2023 and have attracted thousands of users and submissions. The winning solutions and the associated workshop can be accessed at our website https://kddcup23.github.io/.

Data scientists today search large data lakes to discover and integrate datasets. In order to bring together disparate data sources, dataset discovery methods rely on some form of schema matching: the process of establishing correspondences between datasets. Traditionally, schema matching has been used to find matching pairs of columns between a source and a target schema. However, the use of schema matching in dataset discovery methods differs from its original use. Nowadays schema matching serves as a building block for indicating and ranking inter-dataset relationships. Surprisingly, although a discovery method's success relies highly on the quality of the underlying matching algorithms, the latest discovery methods employ existing schema matching algorithms in an ad-hoc fashion due to the lack of openly-available datasets with ground truth, reference method implementations, and evaluation metrics. In this paper, we aim to rectify the problem of evaluating the effectiveness and efficiency of schema matching methods for the specific needs of dataset discovery. To this end, we propose Valentine, an extensible open-source experiment suite to execute and organize large-scale automated matching experiments on tabular data. Valentine includes implementations of seminal schema matching methods that we either implemented from scratch (due to absence of open source code) or imported from open repositories. The contributions of Valentine are: i) the definition of four schema matching scenarios as encountered in dataset discovery methods, ii) a principled dataset fabrication process tailored to the scope of dataset discovery methods and iii) the most comprehensive evaluation of schema matching techniques to date, offering insight on the strengths and weaknesses of existing techniques, that can serve as a guide for employing schema matching in future dataset discovery methods.

Vietnam is such an attractive tourist destination with its stunning and pristine landscapes and its top-rated unique food and drink. Among thousands of Vietnamese dishes, foreigners and native people are interested in easy-to-eat tastes and easy-to-do recipes, along with reasonable prices, mouthwatering flavors, and popularity. Due to the diversity and almost all the dishes have significant similarities and the lack of quality Vietnamese food datasets, it is hard to implement an auto system to classify Vietnamese food, therefore, make people easier to discover Vietnamese food. This paper introduces a new Vietnamese food dataset named VinaFood21, which consists of 13,950 images corresponding to 21 dishes. We use 10,044 images for model training and 6,682 test images to classify each food in the VinaFood21 dataset and achieved an average accuracy of 74.81% when fine-tuning CNN EfficientNet-B0. (https://github.com/nguyenvd-uit/uit-together-dataset)

Same-style products retrieval plays an important role in e-commerce platforms, aiming to identify the same products which may have different text descriptions or images. It can be used for similar products retrieval from different suppliers or duplicate products detection of one supplier. Common methods use the image as the detected object, but they only consider the visual features and overlook the attribute information contained in the textual descriptions, and perform weakly for products in image less important industries like machinery, hardware tools and electronic component, even if an additional text matching module is added. In this paper, we propose a unified vision-language modeling method for e-commerce same-style products retrieval, which is designed to represent one product with its textual descriptions and visual contents. It contains one sampling skill to collect positive pairs from user click log with category and relevance constrained, and a novel contrastive loss unit to model the image, text, and image+text representations into one joint embedding space. It is capable of cross-modal product-to-product retrieval, as well as style transfer and user-interactive search. Offline evaluations on annotated data demonstrate its superior retrieval performance, and online testings show it can attract more clicks and conversions. Moreover, this model has already been deployed online for similar products retrieval in alibaba.com, the largest B2B e-commerce platform in the world.

Modern recommender systems follow the guiding principle of serving the right user, the right item at the right time. One of their main limitations is that they are typically limited to items already in the catalog. We propose REcommendations BEyond CAtalogs, REBECA, a new class of probabilistic diffusion-based recommender systems that synthesize new items tailored to individual tastes rather than retrieve items from the catalog. REBECA combines efficient training in embedding space with a novel diffusion prior that only requires users' past ratings of items. We evaluate REBECA on real-world data and propose novel personalization metrics for generative recommender systems. Extensive experiments demonstrate that REBECA produces high-quality, personalized recommendations, generating images that align with users' unique preferences.

BigCloneBench is a well-known and widely used large-scale dataset for the evaluation of recall of clone detection tools. It has been beneficial for research on clone detection and has become a standard in evaluating the performance of clone detection tools. More recently, it has also been widely used as a dataset to evaluate machine learning approaches to semantic clone detection or code similarity detection for functional or semantic similarity. This paper demonstrates that BigCloneBench is problematic to use as ground truth for learning or evaluating semantic code similarity, and highlights the aspects of BigCloneBench that affect the ground truth quality. A manual investigation of a statistically significant random sample of 406 Weak Type-3/Type-4 clone pairs revealed that 93% of them do not have a similar functionality and are therefore mislabelled. In a literature review of 179 papers that use BigCloneBench as a dataset, we found 139 papers that used BigCloneBench to evaluate semantic clone detection and where the results are threatened in their validity by the mislabelling. As such, these papers often report high F1 scores (e.g., above 0.9), which indicates overfitting to dataset-specific artefacts rather than genuine semantic similarity detection. We emphasise that using BigCloneBench remains valid for the intended purpose of evaluating syntactic or textual clone detection of Type-1, Type-2, and Type-3 clones. We acknowledge the important contributions of BigCloneBench to two decades of traditional clone detection research. However, the usage of BigCloneBench beyond the intended purpose without careful consideration of its limitations has led to misleading results and conclusions, and potentially harmed the field of semantic clone detection.

User journeys in e-commerce routinely violate the one-to-one assumption that a clicked item on an advertising platform is the same item later purchased on the merchant's website/app. For a significant number of converting sessions on our platform, users click product A but buy product B -- the Click A, Buy B (CABB) phenomenon. Training recommendation models on raw click-conversion pairs therefore rewards items that merely correlate with purchases, leading to biased learning and sub-optimal conversion rates. We reframe conversion prediction as a multi-task problem with separate heads for Click A Buy A (CABA) and Click A Buy B (CABB). To isolate informative CABB conversions from unrelated CABB conversions, we introduce a taxonomy-aware collaborative filtering weighting scheme where each product is first mapped to a leaf node in a product taxonomy, and a category-to-category similarity matrix is learned from large-scale co-engagement logs. This weighting amplifies pairs that reflect genuine substitutable or complementary relations while down-weighting coincidental cross-category purchases. Offline evaluation on e-commerce sessions reduces normalized entropy by 13.9% versus a last-click attribution baseline. An online A/B test on live traffic shows +0.25% gains in the primary business metric.

Humans routinely infer taste, smell, texture, and even sound from food images a phenomenon well studied in cognitive science. However, prior vision language research on food has focused primarily on recognition tasks such as meal identification, ingredient detection, and nutrition estimation. Image-based prediction of multisensory experience remains largely unexplored. We introduce FoodSense, a human-annotated dataset for cross-sensory inference containing 66,842 participant-image pairs across 2,987 unique food images. Each pair includes numeric ratings (1-5) and free-text descriptors for four sensory dimensions: taste, smell, texture, and sound. To enable models to both predict and explain sensory expectations, we expand short human annotations into image-grounded reasoning traces. A large language model generates visual justifications conditioned on the image, ratings, and descriptors. Using these annotations, we train FoodSense-VL, a vision language benchmark model to produce both multisensory ratings and grounded explanations directly from food images. This work connects cognitive science findings on cross-sensory perception with modern instruction tuning for multimodal models and shows that many popular evaluation metrics are insufficient for visually sensory inference.

Generating full-body and multi-genre dance sequences from given music is a challenging task, due to the limitations of existing datasets and the inherent complexity of the fine-grained hand motion and dance genres. To address these problems, we propose FineDance, which contains 14.6 hours of music-dance paired data, with fine-grained hand motions, fine-grained genres (22 dance genres), and accurate posture. To the best of our knowledge, FineDance is the largest music-dance paired dataset with the most dance genres. Additionally, to address monotonous and unnatural hand movements existing in previous methods, we propose a full-body dance generation network, which utilizes the diverse generation capabilities of the diffusion model to solve monotonous problems, and use expert nets to solve unreal problems. To further enhance the genre-matching and long-term stability of generated dances, we propose a Genre&Coherent aware Retrieval Module. Besides, we propose a novel metric named Genre Matching Score to evaluate the genre-matching degree between dance and music. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate the quality of FineDance, and the state-of-the-art performance of FineNet. The FineDance Dataset and more qualitative samples can be found at our website.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated superior performance on various graph learning tasks, including recommendation, where they leverage user-item collaborative filtering signals in graphs. However, theoretical formulations of their capability are scarce, despite their empirical effectiveness in state-of-the-art recommender models. Recently, research has explored the expressiveness of GNNs in general, demonstrating that message passing GNNs are at most as powerful as the Weisfeiler-Lehman test, and that GNNs combined with random node initialization are universal. Nevertheless, the concept of "expressiveness" for GNNs remains vaguely defined. Most existing works adopt the graph isomorphism test as the metric of expressiveness, but this graph-level task may not effectively assess a model's ability in recommendation, where the objective is to distinguish nodes of different closeness. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis of the expressiveness of GNNs in recommendation, considering three levels of expressiveness metrics: graph isomorphism (graph-level), node automorphism (node-level), and topological closeness (link-level). We propose the topological closeness metric to evaluate GNNs' ability to capture the structural distance between nodes, which aligns closely with the objective of recommendation. To validate the effectiveness of this new metric in evaluating recommendation performance, we introduce a learning-less GNN algorithm that is optimal on the new metric and can be optimal on the node-level metric with suitable modification. We conduct extensive experiments comparing the proposed algorithm against various types of state-of-the-art GNN models to explore the explainability of the new metric in the recommendation task. For reproducibility, implementation codes are available at https://github.com/HKUDS/GTE.

In this work we propose a new computational framework, based on generative deep models, for synthesis of photo-realistic food meal images from textual list of its ingredients. Previous works on synthesis of images from text typically rely on pre-trained text models to extract text features, followed by generative neural networks (GAN) aimed to generate realistic images conditioned on the text features. These works mainly focus on generating spatially compact and well-defined categories of objects, such as birds or flowers, but meal images are significantly more complex, consisting of multiple ingredients whose appearance and spatial qualities are further modified by cooking methods. To generate real-like meal images from ingredients, we propose Cook Generative Adversarial Networks (CookGAN), CookGAN first builds an attention-based ingredients-image association model, which is then used to condition a generative neural network tasked with synthesizing meal images. Furthermore, a cycle-consistent constraint is added to further improve image quality and control appearance. Experiments show our model is able to generate meal images corresponding to the ingredients.

Many tasks revolve around editing a document, whether code or text. We formulate the revision similarity problem to unify a wide range of machine learning evaluation problems whose goal is to assess a revision to an existing document. We observe that revisions usually change only a small portion of an existing document, so the existing document and its immediate revisions share a majority of their content. We formulate five adequacy criteria for revision similarity measures, designed to align them with human judgement. We show that popular pairwise measures, like BLEU, fail to meet these criteria, because their scores are dominated by the shared content. They report high similarity between two revisions when humans would assess them as quite different. This is a fundamental flaw we address. We propose a novel static measure, Excision Score (ES), which computes longest common subsequence (LCS) to remove content shared by an existing document with the ground truth and predicted revisions, before comparing only the remaining divergent regions. This is analogous to a surgeon creating a sterile field to focus on the work area. We use approximation to speed the standard cubic LCS computation to quadratic. In code-editing evaluation, where static measures are often used as a cheap proxy for passing tests, we demonstrate that ES surpasses existing measures. When aligned with test execution on HumanEvalFix, ES improves over its nearest competitor, SARI, by 12% Pearson correlation and by >21% over standard measures like BLEU. The key criterion is invariance to shared context; when we perturb HumanEvalFix with increased shared context, ES' improvement over SARI increases to 20% and >30% over standard measures. ES also handles other corner cases that other measures do not, such as correctly aligning moved code blocks, and appropriately rewarding matching insertions or deletions.

Product recommendation systems are important for major movie studios during the movie greenlight process and as part of machine learning personalization pipelines. Collaborative Filtering (CF) models have proved to be effective at powering recommender systems for online streaming services with explicit customer feedback data. CF models do not perform well in scenarios in which feedback data is not available, in cold start situations like new product launches, and situations with markedly different customer tiers (e.g., high frequency customers vs. casual customers). Generative natural language models that create useful theme-based representations of an underlying corpus of documents can be used to represent new product descriptions, like new movie plots. When combined with CF, they have shown to increase the performance in cold start situations. Outside of those cases though in which explicit customer feedback is available, recommender engines must rely on binary purchase data, which materially degrades performance. Fortunately, purchase data can be combined with product descriptions to generate meaningful representations of products and customer trajectories in a convenient product space in which proximity represents similarity. Learning to measure the distance between points in this space can be accomplished with a deep neural network that trains on customer histories and on dense vectorizations of product descriptions. We developed a system based on Collaborative (Deep) Metric Learning (CML) to predict the purchase probabilities of new theatrical releases. We trained and evaluated the model using a large dataset of customer histories, and tested the model for a set of movies that were released outside of the training window. Initial experiments show gains relative to models that do not train on collaborative preferences.