Towards Fairness in Provably Communication-Efficient Federated Recommender Systems
This addresses communication efficiency and fairness concerns for federated recommender systems where users cannot share sensitive data, though it builds incrementally on random sampling approaches.
The paper tackles the dual challenges of communication overhead and demographic bias in federated recommender systems, establishing sample complexity bounds and proposing a two-phase dual-fair update technique that reduces communication cost by ~47% and demographic bias by ~40% while maintaining accuracy.
To reduce the communication overhead caused by parallel training of multiple clients, various federated learning (FL) techniques use random client sampling. Nonetheless, ensuring the efficacy of random sampling and determining the optimal number of clients to sample in federated recommender systems (FRSs) remains challenging due to the isolated nature of each user as a separate client. This challenge is exacerbated in models where public and private features can be separated, and FL allows communication of only public features (item gradients). In this study, we establish sample complexity bounds that dictate the ideal number of clients required for improved communication efficiency and retained accuracy in such models. In line with our theoretical findings, we empirically demonstrate that RS-FairFRS reduces communication cost (~47%). Second, we demonstrate the presence of class imbalance among clients that raises a substantial equity concern for FRSs. Unlike centralized machine learning, clients in FRS can not share raw data, including sensitive attributes. For this, we introduce RS-FairFRS, first fairness under unawareness FRS built upon random sampling based FRS. While random sampling improves communication efficiency, we propose a novel two-phase dual-fair update technique to achieve fairness without revealing protected attributes of active clients participating in training. Our results on real-world datasets and different sensitive features illustrate a significant reduction in demographic bias (~approx40\%), offering a promising path to achieving fairness and communication efficiency in FRSs without compromising the overall accuracy of FRS.