# A Graphical Formalism for Commonsense Reasoning with Recipes

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.09042 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09042/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 4 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jun 2023.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reasoning-benchmarks-and-evaluation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [Multi-modal Cooking Workflow Construction for Food Recipes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09151/) (2020)
- [A Rich Recipe Representation as Plan to Support Expressive Multi Modal Queries on Recipe Content and Preparation Process](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17109/) (2022)
- [Repurposing of Resources: from Everyday Problem Solving through to Crisis Management](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08425/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Whilst cooking is a very important human activity, there has been little consideration given to how we can formalize recipes for use in a reasoning framework. We address this need by proposing a graphical formalization that captures the comestibles (ingredients, intermediate food items, and final products), and the actions on comestibles in the form of a labelled bipartite graph. We then propose formal definitions for comparing recipes, for composing recipes from subrecipes, and for deconstructing recipes into subrecipes. We also introduce and compare two formal definitions for substitution into recipes which are required when there are missing ingredients, or some actions are not possible, or because there is a need to change the final product somehow.