English

Low-pass Personalized Subgraph Federated Recommendation

Information Retrieval 2026-03-24 v1 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning

Abstract

Federated Recommender Systems (FRS) preserve privacy by training decentralized models on client-specific user-item subgraphs without sharing raw data. However, FRS faces a unique challenge: subgraph structural imbalance, where drastic variations in subgraph scale (user/item counts) and connectivity (item degree) misalign client representations, making it challenging to train a robust model that respects each client's unique structural characteristics. To address this, we propose a Low-pass Personalized Subgraph Federated recommender system (LPSFed). LPSFed leverages graph Fourier transforms and low-pass spectral filtering to extract low-frequency structural signals that remain stable across subgraphs of varying size and degree, allowing robust personalized parameter updates guided by similarity to a neutral structural anchor. Additionally, we leverage a localized popularity bias-aware margin that captures item-degree imbalance within each subgraph and incorporates it into a personalized bias correction term to mitigate recommendation bias. Supported by theoretical analysis and validated on five real-world datasets, LPSFed achieves superior recommendation accuracy and enhances model robustness.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.20338,
  title  = {Low-pass Personalized Subgraph Federated Recommendation},
  author = {Wooseok Sim and Hogun Park},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.20338},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted at ICLR 2026. 31 pages, 3 figures, 12 tables

R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:30:26.120Z