FoodieQA: A Multimodal Dataset for Fine-Grained Understanding of Chinese Food Culture
Wenyan Li, Crystina Zhang, Jiaang Li, Qiwei Peng, Raphael Tang, Li Zhou, Weijia Zhang, Guimin Hu
Abstract
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.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{li-etal-2024-foodieqa,
title = "{F}oodie{QA}: A Multimodal Dataset for Fine-Grained Understanding of {C}hinese Food Culture",
author = "Li, Wenyan and
Zhang, Crystina and
Li, Jiaang and
Peng, Qiwei and
Tang, Raphael and
Zhou, Li and
Zhang, Weijia and
Hu, Guimin and
Yuan, Yifei and
S{\o}gaard, Anders and
Hershcovich, Daniel and
Elliott, Desmond",
editor = "Al-Onaizan, Yaser and
Bansal, Mohit and
Chen, Yun-Nung",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = nov,
year = "2024",
address = "Miami, Florida, USA",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.1063/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.1063",
pages = "19077--19095"
}