# January Food Benchmark (JFB): A Public Benchmark Dataset and Evaluation Suite for Multimodal Food Analysis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09966 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09966/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [A Multitask, Multilingual, Multimodal Evaluation of ChatGPT on Reasoning, Hallucination, and Interactivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04023/) (2023)
- [Fine-Grained Image Analysis with Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06119/) (2021)
- [Recipe1M+: A Dataset for Learning Cross-Modal Embeddings for Cooking Recipes and Food Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.06553/) (2018)
- [A Survey on Food Computing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.07202/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [FAM-Bench: A Multimodal Benchmark for Condition-Aware Food-as-Medicine Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.31410/) (2026)
- [FoodSense: A Multisensory Food Dataset and Benchmark for Predicting Taste, Smell, Texture, and Sound from Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14388/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Progress in AI for automated nutritional analysis is critically hampered by the lack of standardized evaluation methodologies and high-quality, real-world benchmark datasets. To address this, we introduce three primary contributions. First, we present the January Food Benchmark (JFB), a publicly available collection of 1,000 food images with human-validated annotations. Second, we detail a comprehensive benchmarking framework, including robust metrics and a novel, application-oriented overall score designed to assess model performance holistically. Third, we provide baseline results from both general-purpose Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and our own specialized model, january/food-vision-v1. Our evaluation demonstrates that the specialized model achieves an Overall Score of 86.2, a 12.1-point improvement over the best-performing general-purpose configuration. This work offers the research community a valuable new evaluation dataset and a rigorous framework to guide and benchmark future developments in automated nutritional analysis.