UFGraphFR: An attempt at a federated recommendation system based on user text characteristics

Code

• github.com/trueWangSyutung/UFGraphFR
  OfficialIn paperpytorch★ 2

Abstract

Federated learning has emerged as a key paradigm in privacy-preserving computing due to its "data usable but not visible" property, enabling users to collaboratively train models without sharing raw data. Motivated by this, federated recommendation systems offer a promising architecture that balances user privacy with recommendation accuracy through distributed collaborative learning. However, existing federated recommendation methods often neglect the underlying semantic or behavioral relationships between users during parameter aggregation, limiting their effectiveness. To address this, graph-based federated recommendation systems have been proposed to leverage neighborhood information. Yet, conventional graph construction methods usually require access to raw user data or explicit social links, which contradicts the strict privacy requirements of federated learning. In this work, we propose UFGraphFR (User Text-feature-based Graph Federated Recommendation), a personalized federated recommendation framework that constructs a user graph based on clients' locally embedded text features. Our core assumption is that users with similar textual descriptions exhibit similar preferences. UFGraphFR introduces two key components: a privacy-preserving user relationship graph built from the joint embedding layer's weight matrix without leaking raw user attributes, and a Transformer-based architecture to model temporal dependencies in user-item interaction sequences. Experimental results on benchmark datasets such as MovieLens and HetRec2011 demonstrate that UFGraphFR achieves competitive accuracy compared to centralized and state-of-the-art federated baselines while preserving user privacy. Code is available at https://github.com/trueWangSyutung/UFGraphFR

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