Federated User Behavior Modeling for Privacy-Preserving LLM Recommendation

TL;DR

This paper introduces SF-UBM, a federated learning framework that enables privacy-preserving cross-domain user behavior modeling for LLM-based recommendation systems, addressing data heterogeneity and privacy concerns.

Contribution

It proposes a novel semantic-enhanced federated architecture with knowledge distillation and prompt space alignment to improve cross-domain recommendations without sharing user data.

Findings

SF-UBM outperforms recent SOTA methods on real-world datasets.

The semantic bridge via natural language effectively connects disjoint domains.

Knowledge distillation enhances cross-domain knowledge integration.

Abstract

Large Language Models have shown great success in recommender systems. However, the limited and sparse nature of user data often restricts the LLM's ability to effectively model behavior patterns. To address this, existing studies have explored cross-domain solutions by conducting Cross-Domain Recommendation tasks. But previous methods typically assume domains are overlapped and can be accessed readily. None of the LLM methods address the privacy-preserving issues in the CDR settings, that is, Privacy-Preserving Cross-Domain Recommendation. Conducting non-overlapping PPCDR with LLM is challenging since: 1)The inability to share user identity or behavioral data across domains impedes effective cross-domain alignment. 2)The heterogeneity of data modalities across domains complicates knowledge integration. 3)Fusing collaborative filtering signals from traditional recommendation models with LLMs is difficult, as they operate within distinct feature spaces. To address the above issues, we propose SF-UBM, a Semantic-enhanced Federated User Behavior Modeling method. Specifically, to deal with Challenge 1, we leverage natural language as a universal bridge to connect disjoint domains via a semantic-enhanced federated architecture. Here, text-based item representations are encrypted and shared, while user-specific data remains local. To handle Challenge 2, we design a Fact-counter Knowledge Distillation module to integrate domain-agnostic knowledge with domain-specific knowledge, across different data modalities. To tackle Challenge 3, we project pre-learned user preferences and cross-domain item representations into the soft prompt space, aligning behavioral and semantic spaces for effective LLM learning. We conduct extensive experiments on three pairs of real-world domains, and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of SF-UBM compared to the recent SOTA methods.