# From Canteen Food to Daily Meals: Generalizing Food Recognition to More Practical Scenarios

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.07403 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07403/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Features with Deep Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.02791/) (2015)
- [Deep CORAL: Correlation Alignment for Deep Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.01719/) (2016)
- [Deep Hashing Network for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.07522/) (2017)
- [CyCADA: Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03213/) (2017)
- [Deep Transfer Learning with Joint Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.06636/) (2016)
- [Deep Domain Confusion: Maximizing for Domain Invariance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3474/) (2014)
- [VisDA: The Visual Domain Adaptation Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.06924/) (2017)
- [Contrastive Adaptation Network for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00976/) (2019)
- [Return of Frustratingly Easy Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.05547/) (2015)
- [Domain Separation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06019/) (2016)
- [Rectifying Pseudo Label Learning via Uncertainty Estimation for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03773/) (2020)
- [Multi-Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02176/) (2018)
- [DLOW: Domain Flow for Adaptation and Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05418/) (2018)
- [CDTrans: Cross-domain Transformer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06165/) (2021)
- [Deep Subdomain Adaptation Network for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09388/) (2021)
- [Visual Domain Adaptation with Manifold Embedded Distribution Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.07258/) (2018)
- [Large Scale Visual Food Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16107/) (2021)
- [Category Contrast for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Visual Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02885/) (2021)
- [Nutrition5k: Towards Automatic Nutritional Understanding of Generic Food](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03375/) (2021)
- [Domain Adaptive Neural Networks for Object Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.6041/) (2014)
- [Transfer Learning with Dynamic Adversarial Adaptation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08184/) (2019)
- [FoodX-251: A Dataset for Fine-grained Food Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06167/) (2019)
- [Rethinking Softmax with Cross-Entropy: Neural Network Classifier as Mutual Information Estimator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10688/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [RoDE: Linear Rectified Mixture of Diverse Experts for Food Large Multi-Modal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12730/) (2024)
- [Nutrition Estimation for Dietary Management: A Transformer Approach with Depth Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01938/) (2024)
- [CookingDiffusion: Cooking Procedural Image Generation with Stable Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09042/) (2025)
- [Retrieval Augmented Recipe Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.08715/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Action and Ingredient Modeling for Semantically Grounded Recipe Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15862/) (2026)
- [FMiFood: Multi-modal Contrastive Learning for Food Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03922/) (2024)
- [Khana: A Comprehensive Indian Cuisine Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06006/) (2025)
- [Food-R1: A Unified Multi-Task Food Vision-Language Model with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.04986/) (2026)
- [ReGraph: Learning to Generate Recipe Graphs from Food Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.06917/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The precise recognition of food categories plays a pivotal role for intelligent health management, attracting significant research attention in recent years. Prominent benchmarks, such as Food-101 and VIREO Food-172, provide abundant food image resources that catalyze the prosperity of research in this field. Nevertheless, these datasets are well-curated from canteen scenarios and thus deviate from food appearances in daily life. This discrepancy poses great challenges in effectively transferring classifiers trained on these canteen datasets to broader daily-life scenarios encountered by humans. Toward this end, we present two new benchmarks, namely DailyFood-172 and DailyFood-16, specifically designed to curate food images from everyday meals. These two datasets are used to evaluate the transferability of approaches from the well-curated food image domain to the everyday-life food image domain. In addition, we also propose a simple yet effective baseline method named Multi-Cluster Reference Learning (MCRL) to tackle the aforementioned domain gap. MCRL is motivated by the observation that food images in daily-life scenarios exhibit greater intra-class appearance variance compared with those in well-curated benchmarks. Notably, MCRL can be seamlessly coupled with existing approaches, yielding non-trivial performance enhancements. We hope our new benchmarks can inspire the community to explore the transferability of food recognition models trained on well-curated datasets toward practical real-life applications.