Title
FedCT: Federated Collaborative Transfer for Recommendation
Abstract
ABSTRACTWhen a user starts exploring items from a new area of an e-commerce system, cross-domain recommendation techniques come into help by transferring the abundant knowledge from the user's familiar domains to this new domain. However, this solution usually requires direct information sharing between service providers on the cloud which may not always be available and brings privacy concerns. In this paper, we show that one can overcome these concerns through learning on edge devices such as smartphones and laptops. The cross-domain recommendation problem is formalized under a decentralized computing environment with multiple domain servers. And we identify two key challenges for this setting: the unavailability of direct transfer and the heterogeneity of the domain-specific user representations. We then propose to learn and maintain a decentralized user encoding on each user's personal space. The optimization follows a variational inference framework that maximizes the mutual information between the user's encoding and the domain-specific user information from all her interacted domains. Empirical studies on real-world datasets exhibit the effectiveness of our proposed framework on recommendation tasks and its superiority over domain-pairwise transfer models. The resulting system offers reduced communication cost and an efficient inference mechanism that does not depend on the number of involved domains, and it allows flexible plugin of domain-specific transfer models without significant interference on other domains.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1145/3404835.3462825
Research and Development in Information Retrieval
Keywords
DocType
Citations 
Recommendation System, Federated Learning, Transfer Learning, User Representation
Conference
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.36
0
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Shuchang Liu1233.35
Shuyuan Xu2132.88
Wenhui Yu310.36
Zuohui Fu48010.96
Yongfeng Zhang597661.43
Amélie Marian6128077.92