Dividing and Conquering Cross-Modal Recipe Retrieval: from Nearest Neighbours Baselines to SoTA

We propose a novel non-parametric method for cross-modal retrieval which is applied on top of precomputed image and text embeddings. By combining our method with standard approaches for building image and text encoders, trained independently with a self-supervised classification objective, we create a baseline model which outperforms most existing methods on a challenging image-to-recipe task. We also use our method for comparing image and text encoders trained using different modern approaches, thus addressing the issues hindering the developments of novel methods for cross-modal recipe retrieval. We demonstrate how to use the insights from model comparison and extend our baseline model with standard triplet loss that improves SoTA on the Recipe1M dataset by a large margin, while using only precomputed features and with much less complexity than existing methods.