UFGraphFR: Graph Federation Recommendation System based on User Text description features

TL;DR

UFGraphFR is a federated recommendation system that leverages semantic text descriptions and graph neural networks to improve accuracy while preserving user privacy.

Contribution

The paper introduces UFGraphFR, a novel federated recommendation framework that constructs secure user relationship graphs from semantic vectors derived from user descriptions.

Findings

Significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in accuracy.

Maintains robustness across different pre-trained models.

Effectively combines semantic vectors, secure graphs, and personalized sequences.

Abstract

Federated learning offers a privacy-preserving framework for recommendation systems by enabling local data processing; however, data localization introduces substantial obstacles. Traditional federated recommendation approaches treat each user as an isolated entity, failing to construct global user relationship graphs that capture collaborative signals, which limits the accuracy of recommendations. To address this limitation, we derive insight from the insight that semantic similarity reflects preference. similarity, which can be used to improve the construction of user relationship graphs. This paper proposes UFGraphFR, a novel framework with three key components: 1) On the client side, private structured data is first transformed into text descriptions. These descriptions are then encoded into semantic vectors using pre-trained models; 2) On the server side, user relationship graphs are securely reconstructed using aggregated model weights without accessing raw data, followed by information propagation through lightweight graph neural networks; 3) On the client side, user behavior sequences are personalized using Transformer architectures. Extensive experiments conducted on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that UFGraphFR significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both recommendation accuracy and personalization. The framework also maintains robustness across different pre-trained models, as evidenced by the consistent performance metrics obtained. This work provides a practical method for efficient federated recommendations with strict privacy by using semantic vectors, secure user relationship graphs, and personalized behavior sequences. The code is available at: https://github.com/trueWangSyutung/UFGraphFR.