Small Average Error, Wide Individual Error: General-Purpose LLMs Estimating Energy Intake from Meal Photos in a Feeding Trial

Xiaomeng Li · 2026 · arXiv

DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2610.26538 · open-access PDF

Abstract

Photo-based estimation of food energy could ease dietary assessment, and general-purpose multimodal large language models (LLMs) make such estimates easy to obtain. Most evaluations use one photo taken before eating and compare with energy served, while dietary assessment needs energy eaten. We evaluated six models from two vendors (Claude Haiku, Sonnet and Opus 5.5; GPT-6 luna, 6.1 sol and 6 astra) on 802 meals from ACETADA, a controlled feeding trial with weighed intake, with the before photo only, before and after photos in separate calls (subtraction), or both photos in one request. Three

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