DSDGF-Nutri: A Decoupled Self-Distillation Network with Gating Fusion For Food Nutritional Assessment

Accurate assessment of food nutrition is essential for promoting healthy eating habits. While recent deep learning approaches have enhanced vision-based nutritional estimation through RGB-D multi-modal fusion, they often overlook fine-grained surface components (e.g., oil and sugar) that significantly influence nutritional values. Some recent approaches have improved accuracy by incorporating ingredient data, but their reliance on such input during inference limits practical applicability, as ingredient details are often unavailable in real-world settings. To address this limitation, we propose DSDGF-Nutri, a novel Decoupled Self-Distillation network with Gating Fusion for food Nutri tional assessment. Our method leverages ingredient knowledge during training but relies solely on RGB-D inputs at inference. Specifically, DSDGF-Nutri introduces: (1) a self-distillation mechanism with gating fusion that transfers ingredient-aware features to the RGB-D network, enabling robust prediction without test-time ingredient input, and (2) a multi-task decoupling architecture with task-specific decoders to minimize cross-task interference. Extensive evaluations on two benchmark datasets demonstrate DSDGF-Nutri outperforms existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art results. This work establishes a new paradigm of multimodal fusion in nutritional assessment by unifying scientific measurements with scalable computer vision applications.