NutriVisRAG: Multimodal Exemplar Grounding for Nutrient Estimation with Vision-Language Models

Lubnaa Abdur Rahman, Ioannis Papathanail, Maria Panagiotou, Nefeli Dimitropoulou, Margret Harðardóttir +3

Diet is a major determinant of health, yet accurate dietary assessment from free-living meal images remains challenging. Existing retrieval-based Vision-Language Model (VLM) approaches to nutrient estimation typically rely on textual food representations, while, to our knowledge, direct grounding on visually similar annotated meals has not been investigated. We present NutriVisRAG, a retrieval-augmented generation framework that uses a vision encoder to retrieve similar meals with known nutritional annotations and provide them as multimodal in-context exemplars for VLM nutrient estimation at inference time, without task-specific fine-tuning. We evaluate NutriVisRAG across four datasets, four VLMs, three retrieval encoders, and two prompting strategies, including free-living meals from adults with insulin-treated diabetes, where carbohydrate estimates are compared against two dietitians' annotations. Across all 96 configurations (4 datasets x 4 VLMs x 3 retrieval encoders x 2 prompting strategies), NutriVisRAG reduced the primary estimation error in 56, with improvements more frequent under whole-meal (35/48) than per-item prompting (21/48). Across the evaluated configurations,…