FoodSky: A food-oriented large language model that can pass the chef and dietetic examinations

Food is the cornerstone of both survival and social life. With the increasing complexity of global dietary cultures, there is a growing demand for food intelligence to enable tasks like recipe recommendations and diet-disease correlation discovery. To address this, we introduce the food-oriented large language model (LLM) FoodSky, which offers fine-grained perception and reasoning on food data. We constructed a food corpus, FoodEarth, from various authoritative sources to enhance FoodSky's knowledge. We also developed the topic-based selective state space model and hierarchical topic retrieval augmented generation algorithms to improve FoodSky's ability to capture fine-grained food semantics and generate context-aware food-relevant text. Extensive experiments show that FoodSky significantly outperforms general-purpose LLMs on the Chinese National Chef Examination and Dietetic Examination, achieving an accuracy of 83.3% and 91.2%, respectively. Beyond enhancing culinary creativity and promoting healthier eating patterns, FoodSky aims to establish a new benchmark for domain-specific LLMs in addressing real-world food-related challenges.