PDC-FRS: Privacy-Preserving Data Contribution for Federated Recommender System

No Thumbnail Available
File version
Author(s)
Yang, C
Yuan, W
Qu, L
Nguyen, TT
Griffith University Author(s)
Primary Supervisor
Other Supervisors
Editor(s)

Sheng, Quan Z

Dobbie, Gill

Jiang, Jing

Zhang, Xuyun

Zhang, Wei Emma

Manolopoulos, Yannis

Wu, Jia

Mansoor, Wathiq

Ma, Congbo

Date
2025
Size
File type(s)
Location

Sydney, Australia

License
Abstract

Federated recommender systems (FedRecs) have emerged as a popular research direction for protecting users’ privacy in on-device recommendations. In FedRecs, users keep their data locally and only contribute their local collaborative information by uploading model parameters to a central server. While this rigid framework protects users’ raw data during training, it severely compromises the recommendation model’s performance due to the following reasons: (1) Due to the power law distribution nature of user behavior data, individual users have few data points to train a recommendation model, resulting in uploaded model updates that may be far from optimal; (2) As each user’s uploaded parameters are learned from local data, which lacks global collaborative information, relying solely on parameter aggregation methods such as FedAvg to fuse global collaborative information may be suboptimal. To bridge this performance gap, we propose a novel federated recommendation framework, PDC-FRS. Specifically, we design a privacy-preserving data contribution mechanism that allows users to share their data with a differential privacy guarantee. Based on the shared but perturbed data, an auxiliary model is trained in parallel with the original federated recommendation process. This auxiliary model enhances FedRec by augmenting each user’s local dataset and integrating global collaborative information. To demonstrate the effectiveness of PDC-FRS, we conduct extensive experiments on two widely used recommendation datasets. The empirical results showcase the superiority of PDC-FRScompared to baseline methods.

Journal Title
Conference Title

Advanced Data Mining and Applications: 20th International Conference, ADMA 2024, Sydney, NSW, Australia, December 3–5, 2024, Proceedings, Part VI

Book Title
Edition
Volume

15392

Issue
Thesis Type
Degree Program
School
Publisher link
Patent number
Funder(s)
Grant identifier(s)
Rights Statement
Rights Statement
Item Access Status
Note
Access the data
Related item(s)
Subject
Persistent link to this record
Citation

Yang, C; Yuan, W; Qu, L; Nguyen, TT, PDC-FRS: Privacy-Preserving Data Contribution for Federated Recommender System, Advanced Data Mining and Applications: 20th International Conference, ADMA 2024, Sydney, NSW, Australia, December 3–5, 2024, Proceedings, Part VI, 2025, 15392, pp. 65-79