Communication-efficient federated recommendation model based on many-objective evolutionary algorithm

Abstract

The federated recommendation system (FedRS), which is the application of the recommendation system (RS) in federated learning, has been creatively developed as increasing attention has been paid to user privacy protection. However, traditional federated learning consumes excessive communication time and resource, which seriously limits the development of the FedRS. To reduce the communication cost and improve the recommendation performance of FedRS, an improved many-objective federated recommendation model with a novel parameter reduction strategy is proposed in this paper. The model aims to optimize the number of parameters shared between the server and client to improve communication efficiency in the federated process. Optimal parameter selection solutions can be obtained using the many-objective evolutionary algorithm (MaOEA), which can optimize the recommendation accuracy, novelty, diversity, and communication efficiency of FedRS simultaneously. Furthermore, the reference vector guided evolutionary algorithm (RVEA) was adopted to evaluate the proposed model. Experiments were performed on two famous recommendation datasets to examine the superiority of RVEA for the evaluation. The performance results indicated that the proposed model can not only provide accurate, diverse, and novel recommendations for the client, but can also realize efficient communication.