FedRec++: Lossless Federated Recommendation with Explicit Feedback

Abstract

With the marriage of federated machine learning and recommender systems for privacy-aware preference modeling and personalization, there comes a new research branch called federated recommender systems aiming to build a recommendation model in a distributed way, i.e., each user is represented as a distributed client where his/her original rating data are not shared with the server or the other clients. Notice that, besides the sensitive information of a specific rating score assigned to a certain item by a user, the information of a user's rated set of items shall also be well protected. Some very recent works propose to randomly sample some unrated items for each user and then assign some virtual ratings, so that the server can not identify the scores and the set of rated items easily during the server-client interactions. However, the virtual ratings assigned to the randomly sampled items will inevitably introduce some noise to the model training process, which will then cause loss in recommendation performance. In this paper, we propose a novel lossless federated recommendation method (FedRec++) by allocating some denoising clients (i.e., users) to eliminate the noise in a privacy-aware manner. We further analyse our FedRec++ in terms of security and losslessness, and discuss its generality in the context of existing works. Extensive empirical studies clearly show the effectiveness of our FedRec++ in providing accurate and privacy-aware recommendation without much additional communication cost.