MS-GDA: Improving Heterogeneous Recipe Representation via Multinomial Sampling Graph Data Augmentation

We study the problem of classifying different cooking styles, based on the recipe. The difficulty is that the same food ingredients, seasoning, and the very similar instructions result in different flavors, with different cooking styles. Existing methods have limitations: they mainly focus on homogeneous data (e.g., instruction or image), ignoring heterogeneous data (e.g., flavor compound or ingredient), which certainly hurts the classification performance. This is because collecting enough available heterogeneous data of a recipe is a non-trivial task. In this paper, we present a new heterogeneous data augmentation method to improve classification performance. Specifically, we first construct a heterogeneous recipe graph network to represent heterogeneous data, which includes four main-stream types of heterogeneous data: ingredient, flavor compound, image, and instruction. Then, we draw a sequence of augmented graphs for Semi-Supervised learning through multinomial sampling. The probability distribution of sampling depends on the Cosine distance between the nodes of graph. In this way, we name our approach as Multinomial Sampling Graph Data Augmentation (MS-GDA). Extensive experiments demonstrate that MS-GDA significantly outperforms SOTA baselines on cuisine classification and region prediction with the recipe benchmark dataset. Code is available at https://github.com/LiangzheChen/MS-GDA.