Multimodal Point-of-Interest Recommendation

TL;DR

This work created a pseudo restaurant check-in history dataset from the Foursquare dataset and the FoodX-251 dataset by converting pictures into text descriptions with a multimodal model called LLaVA, and used a language-based sequential recommendation framework named Recformer proposed in 2023.

Abstract

Large Language Models are applied to recommendation tasks such as items to buy and news articles to read. Point of Interest is quite a new area to sequential recommendation based on language representations of multimodal datasets. As a first step to prove our concepts, we focused on restaurant recommendation based on each user's past visit history. When choosing a next restaurant to visit, a user would consider genre and location of the venue and, if available, pictures of dishes served there. We created a pseudo restaurant check-in history dataset from the Foursquare dataset and the FoodX-251 dataset by converting pictures into text descriptions with a multimodal model called LLaVA, and used a language-based sequential recommendation framework named Recformer proposed in 2023. A model trained on this semi-multimodal dataset has outperformed another model trained on the same dataset without picture descriptions. This suggests that this semi-multimodal model reflects actual human behaviours and that our path to a multimodal recommendation model is in the right direction.

Figures (2)

• Figure 1: Dataset preparation
• Figure 2: Experimental setup