{"ID":2839430,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15201","arxiv_id":"2511.15201","title":"Towards Unbiased Cross-Modal Representation Learning for Food Image-to-Recipe Retrieval","abstract":"This paper addresses the challenges of learning representations for recipes and food images in the cross-modal retrieval problem. As the relationship between a recipe and its cooked dish is cause-and-effect, treating a recipe as a text source describing the visual appearance of a dish for learning representation, as the existing approaches, will create bias misleading image-and-recipe similarity judgment. Specifically, a food image may not equally capture every detail in a recipe, due to factors such as the cooking process, dish presentation, and image-capturing conditions. The current representation learning tends to capture dominant visual-text alignment while overlooking subtle variations that determine retrieval relevance. In this paper, we model such bias in cross-modal representation learning using causal theory. The causal view of this problem suggests ingredients as one of the confounder sources and a simple backdoor adjustment can alleviate the bias. By causal intervention, we reformulate the conventional model for food-to-recipe retrieval with an additional term to remove the potential bias in similarity judgment. Based on this theory-informed formulation, we empirically prove the oracle performance of retrieval on the Recipe1M dataset to be MedR=1 across the testing data sizes of 1K, 10K, and even 50K. We also propose a plug-and-play neural module, which is essentially a multi-label ingredient classifier for debiasing. New state-of-the-art search performances are reported on the Recipe1M dataset.","short_abstract":"This paper addresses the challenges of learning representations for recipes and food images in the cross-modal retrieval problem. As the relationship between a recipe and its cooked dish is cause-and-effect, treating a recipe as a text source describing the visual appearance of a dish for learning representation, as th...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15201","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15201v2","authors":"[\"Qing Wang\",\"Chong-Wah Ngo\",\"Ee-Peng Lim\"]","published":"2025-11-19T07:39:53Z","proceeding":"cs.CV","tasks":"[\"cs.CV\",\"cs.MM\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}