A Privacy-Preserving Framework with Multi-Modal Data for Cross-Domain Recommendation
This addresses privacy concerns and data sparsity in recommendation systems, though it appears incremental by combining existing techniques like disentanglement and differential privacy.
The paper tackles the problem of data sparsity in cross-domain recommendation by proposing a framework that uses multi-modal data to disentangle domain-common and domain-specific features while protecting user privacy with local differential privacy, achieving superior performance over state-of-the-art baselines on four real-world datasets.
Cross-domain recommendation (CDR) aims to enhance recommendation accuracy in a target domain with sparse data by leveraging rich information in a source domain, thereby addressing the data-sparsity problem. Some existing CDR methods highlight the advantages of extracting domain-common and domain-specific features to learn comprehensive user and item representations. However, these methods can't effectively disentangle these components as they often rely on simple user-item historical interaction information (such as ratings, clicks, and browsing), neglecting the rich multi-modal features. Additionally, they don't protect user-sensitive data from potential leakage during knowledge transfer between domains. To address these challenges, we propose a Privacy-Preserving Framework with Multi-Modal Data for Cross-Domain Recommendation, called P2M2-CDR. Specifically, we first design a multi-modal disentangled encoder that utilizes multi-modal information to disentangle more informative domain-common and domain-specific embeddings. Furthermore, we introduce a privacy-preserving decoder to mitigate user privacy leakage during knowledge transfer. Local differential privacy (LDP) is utilized to obfuscate the disentangled embeddings before inter-domain exchange, thereby enhancing privacy protection. To ensure both consistency and differentiation among these obfuscated disentangled embeddings, we incorporate contrastive learning-based domain-inter and domain-intra losses. Extensive Experiments conducted on four real-world datasets demonstrate that P2M2-CDR outperforms other state-of-the-art single-domain and cross-domain baselines.