Model doesn't seem to beat user item average on a couple datasets

[ys2ea]

As a test, I calculated the RMSE using simply (user average + item average)/2, on the same train test split provided in the code. For the Douban dataset I got RMSE=0.776, for the flixster dataset I got RMSE=0.958. Both better than the results in the paper.
Just wondering did you do a similar test.