Paper ID: 2406.11030

FoodieQA: A Multimodal Dataset for Fine-Grained Understanding of Chinese Food Culture

Wenyan Li, Xinyu Zhang, Jiaang Li, Qiwei Peng, Raphael Tang, Li Zhou, Weijia Zhang, Guimin Hu, Yifei Yuan, Anders Søgaard, Daniel Hershcovich, Desmond Elliott

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.

Submitted: Jun 16, 2024