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Food preference learning is an important component of wellness applications and restaurant recommender systems as it provides personalized information for effective food targeting and suggestions. However, existing systems require some form of food journaling to create a historical record of an individual's meal selections. In addition, current interfaces for food or restaurant preference elicitation rely extensively on text-based descriptions and rating methods, which can impose high cognitive load, thereby hampering wide adoption.

In this paper, we propose PlateClick, a novel system that bootstraps food preference using a simple, visual quiz-based user interface. We leverage a pairwise comparison approach with only visual content. Using over 10,028 recipes collected from Yummly, we design a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) to learn the similarity distance metric between food images. Our model is …