Personalized Federated Recommendation with Knowledge Guidance

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission18364 Authors

Keywords: Federated Recommendation, Knowledge Guidance

TL;DR: Guidance Mechanism enables knowledge fusion in federated recommendation, reaching dual-knowledge performance with single knowledge.

Abstract:

Federated Recommendation (FedRec) has emerged as a key paradigm for building privacy-preserving recommender systems. However, existing FedRec models face a critical dilemma: memory-efficient single-knowledge models suffer from a suboptimal knowledge replacement practice that discards valuable personalization, while high-performance dual-knowledge models are often too memory-intensive for practical on-device deployment.
We propose Federated Recommendation with Knowledge Guidance (FedRKG), a model-agnostic framework that resolves this dilemma.
The core principle, Knowledge Guidance, avoids full replacement and instead fuses global knowledge into preserved local embeddings, attaining the personalization benefits of dual-knowledge within a single-knowledge memory footprint.
Furthermore, we introduce Adaptive Guidance, a fine-grained mechanism that dynamically modulates the intensity of this guidance for each user-item interaction, overcoming the limitations of static fusion methods. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that FedRKG significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, validating the effectiveness of our approach.

Primary Area: other topics in machine learning (i.e., none of the above)

Submission Number: 18364