Abstract: This paper presents an adaptation of the alternation technique to tackle the prediction task in recommender systems. These systems are widely considered in electronic commerce to help customers to find products they will probably like or dislike. As the SVD-based approaches, the proposed adapted alternation technique uses all the information stored in the system to find the predictions. The main advantage of this technique with respect to the SVD-based ones is that it can deal with missing data. Furthermore, it has a smaller computational cost. Experimental results with public data sets are provided in order to show the viability of the proposed adapted alternation approach.

Abstract: State-of-the-art approaches for semantic image segmentation are built on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). The typical segmentation architecture is composed of (a) a downsampling path responsible for extracting coarse semantic features, followed by (b) an upsampling path trained to recover the input image resolution at the output of the model and, optionally, (c) a post-processing module (e.g. Conditional Random Fields) to refine the model predictions.
Recently, a new CNN architecture, Densely Connected Convolutional Networks (DenseNets), has shown excellent results on image classification tasks. The idea of DenseNets is based on the observation that if each layer is directly connected to every other layer in a feed-forward fashion then the network will be more accurate and easier to train.
In this paper, we extend DenseNets to deal with the problem of semantic segmentation. We achieve state-of-the-art results on urban scene benchmark datasets such as CamVid and Gatech, without any further post-processing module nor pretraining. Moreover, due to smart construction of the model, our approach has much less parameters than currently published best entries for these datasets.