ChatDiet: Empowering Personalized Nutrition-Oriented Food Recommender Chatbots through an LLM-Augmented Framework

TL;DR

ChatDiet introduces an LLM-based framework that enhances personalized, explainable, and interactive food recommendations by integrating personal and population models with an orchestrator for targeted health outcomes.

Contribution

This paper presents ChatDiet, a novel framework that combines causal personal models and population data within an LLM-powered chatbot for improved personalized nutrition recommendations.

Findings

92% effectiveness rate in food recommendation test

Demonstrated ability to provide personalized and explainable suggestions

Case study validating causal personal model for nutrition effects

Abstract

The profound impact of food on health necessitates advanced nutrition-oriented food recommendation services. Conventional methods often lack the crucial elements of personalization, explainability, and interactivity. While Large Language Models (LLMs) bring interpretability and explainability, their standalone use falls short of achieving true personalization. In this paper, we introduce ChatDiet, a novel LLM-powered framework designed specifically for personalized nutrition-oriented food recommendation chatbots. ChatDiet integrates personal and population models, complemented by an orchestrator, to seamlessly retrieve and process pertinent information. The personal model leverages causal discovery and inference techniques to assess personalized nutritional effects for a specific user, whereas the population model provides generalized information on food nutritional content. The orchestrator retrieves, synergizes and delivers the output of both models to the LLM, providing tailored food recommendations designed to support targeted health outcomes. The result is a dynamic delivery of personalized and explainable food recommendations, tailored to individual user preferences. Our evaluation of ChatDiet includes a compelling case study, where we establish a causal personal model to estimate individual nutrition effects. Our assessments, including a food recommendation test showcasing a 92\% effectiveness rate, coupled with illustrative dialogue examples, underscore ChatDiet's strengths in explainability, personalization, and interactivity.