Improving Cross-Modal Recipe Retrieval with Component-Aware Prompted CLIP Embedding

Cross-modal recipe retrieval is an emerging visual-textual retrieval task, which aims at matching food images with the corresponding recipes. Although large-scale Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) models have achieved impressive performance on a wide range of downstream tasks, they still perform unsatisfactorily on this cross-modal retrieval task due to the following two problems: (1) Features from food images and recipes need to be aligned, simply fine-tuning the pre-trained VLP model's image encoder does not explicitly help with this goal. (2) The text content in the recipe is more structured than the text caption in the VLP model's pre-training corpus, which prevents the VLP model from adapting to the recipe retrieval task. In this paper, we propose a Component-aware Instance-specific Prompt learning (CIP) model that fully exploits the ability of large-scale VLP models. CIP enables us to learn the structured recipe information and therefore allows for aligning visual-textual representations without fine-tuning. Furthermore, we construct a recipe encoder termed Adaptive Recipe Merger (ARM) based on hierarchical Transformers, encouraging the model to learn more effective recipe representations. Extensive experiments on the public Recipe1M dataset demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method by outperforming the state-of-the-art methods on cross-modal recipe retrieval task.