Abstract: We present a computational model that computes and integrates in a nonlocal fashion several configural cues for automatic figure-ground segregation. Our working hypothesis is that the figural status of each pixel is a nonlocal function of several geometric shape properties and it can be estimated without explicitly relying on object boundaries. The methodology is grounded on two elements: multi-directional linear voting and nonlinear diffusion. A first estimation of the figural status of each pixel is obtained as a result of a voting process, in which several differently oriented line-shaped neighborhoods vote to express their belief about the figural status of the pixel. A nonlinear diffusion process is then applied to enforce the coherence of figural status estimates among perceptually homogeneous regions. Computer simulations fit human perception and match the experimental evidence that several cues cooperate in defining figure-ground segregation. The results of this work suggest that figure-ground segregation involves feedback from cells with larger receptive fields in higher visual cortical areas.

Abstract: IF JCR CCIA 2.286 2009 24/103
JCR Impact Factor 2010: 1.851
A major task of research in conversational recommender systems is personalization. Critiquing is a common and powerful form of feedback, where a user can express her feature preferences by applying a series of directional critiques over the recommendations instead of providing specific preference values. Incremental Critiquing is a conversational recommender system that uses critiquing as a feedback to efficiently personalize products. The expectation is that in each cycle the system retrieves the products that best satisfy the user’s soft product preferences from a minimal information input. In this paper, we present a novel technique that increases retrieval quality based on a combination of compatibility and similarity scores. Under the hypothesis that a user learns Turing the recommendation process, we propose two novel exponential reinforcement learning approaches for compatibility that take into account both the instant at which the user makes a critique and the number of satisfied critiques. Moreover, we consider that the impact of features on the similarity differs according to the preferences manifested by the user. We propose a global weighting approach that uses a common weight for nearest cases in order to focus on groups of relevant products. We show that our methodology significantly improves recommendation efficiency in four data sets of different sizes in terms of session length in comparison with state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, our recommender shows higher robustness against noisy user data when compared to classical approaches