FedRec+: Enhancing Privacy and Addressing Heterogeneity in Federated
  Recommendation Systems
Lin Wang Zhichao Wang Xi Leng Xiaoying Tang
Preserving privacy and reducing communication costs for edge users pose
significant challenges in recommendation systems. Although federated learning
has proven effective in protecting privacy by avoiding data exchange between
clients and servers, it has been shown that the server can infer user ratings
based on updated non-zero gradients obtained from two consecutive rounds of
user-uploaded gradients. Moreover, federated recommendation systems (FRS) face
the challenge of heterogeneity, leading to decreased recommendation
performance. In this paper, we propose FedRec+, an ensemble framework for FRS
that enhances privacy while addressing the heterogeneity challenge. FedRec+
employs optimal subset selection based on feature similarity to generate
near-optimal virtual ratings for pseudo items, utilizing only the user's local
information. This approach reduces noise without incurring additional
communication costs. Furthermore, we utilize the Wasserstein distance to
estimate the heterogeneity and contribution of each client, and derive optimal
aggregation weights by solving a defined optimization problem. Experimental
results demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of FedRec+ across various
reference datasets.