Graph neural network (GNN) is widely used for recommendation to model high-order interactions between users and items. Existing GNN-based recommendation methods rely on centralized storage of user-item graphs and centralized model learning. However, user data is privacy-sensitive, and the centralized storage of user-item graphs may arouse privacy concerns and risk. In this paper, we propose a federated framework for privacy-preserving GNN-based recommendation, which can collectively train GNN models from decentralized user data and meanwhile exploit high-order user-item interaction information with privacy well protected. In our method, we locally train GNN model in each user client based on the user-item graph inferred from the local user-item interaction data. Each client uploads the local gradients of GNN to a server for aggregation, which are further sent to user clients for updating local GNN models. Since local gradients may contain private information, we apply local differential privacy techniques to the local gradients to protect user privacy. In addition, in order to protect the items that users have interactions with, we propose to incorporate randomly sampled items as pseudo interacted items for anonymity. To incorporate high-order user-item interactions, we propose a user-item graph expansion method that can find neighboring users with co-interacted items and exchange their embeddings for expanding the local user-item graphs in a privacy-preserving way. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets validate that our approach can achieve competitive results with existing centralized GNN-based recommendation methods and meanwhile effectively protect user privacy.
In the mobile Internet era, recommender systems have become an irreplaceable tool to help users discover useful items, thus alleviating the information overload problem. Recent research on deep neural network (DNN)-based recommender systems have made significant progress in improving prediction accuracy, largely attributed to the widely accessible large-scale user data. Such data is commonly collected from users' personal devices, and then centrally stored in the cloud server to facilitate model training. However, with the rising public concerns on user privacy leakage in online platforms, online users are becoming increasingly anxious over abuses of user privacy. Therefore, it is urgent and beneficial to develop a recommender system that can achieve both high prediction accuracy and strong privacy protection. To this end, we propose a DNN-based recommendation model called PrivRec running on the decentralized federated learning (FL) environment, which ensures that a user's data is fully retained on her/his personal device while contributing to training an accurate model. On the other hand, to better embrace the data heterogeneity (e.g., users' data vary in scale and quality significantly) in FL, we innovatively introduce a first-order meta-learning method that enables fast on-device personalization with only a few data points. Furthermore, to defend against potential malicious participants that pose serious security threat to other users, we further develop a user-level differentially private model, namely DP-PrivRec, so attackers are unable to identify any arbitrary user from the trained model. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on two large-scale datasets in a simulated FL environment, and the results validate the superiority of both PrivRec and DP-PrivRec.
Sequential recommendation (SR) is to accurately recommend a list of items for a user based on her current accessed ones. While new-coming users continuously arrive in the real world, one crucial task is to have inductive SR that can produce embeddings of users and items without re-training. Given user-item interactions can be extremely sparse, another critical task is to have transferable SR that can transfer the knowledge derived from one domain with rich data to another domain. In this work, we aim to present the holistic SR that simultaneously accommodates conventional, inductive, and transferable settings. We propose a novel deep learning-based model, Relational Temporal Attentive Graph Neural Networks (RetaGNN), for holistic SR. The main idea of RetaGNN is three-fold. First, to have inductive and transferable capabilities, we train a relational attentive GNN on the local subgraph extracted from a user-item pair, in which the learnable weight matrices are on various relations among users, items, and attributes, rather than nodes or edges. Second, long-term and short-term temporal patterns of user preferences are encoded by a proposed sequential self-attention mechanism. Third, a relation-aware regularization term is devised for better training of RetaGNN. Experiments conducted on MovieLens, Instagram, and Book-Crossing datasets exhibit that RetaGNN can outperform state-of-the-art methods under conventional, inductive, and transferable settings. The derived attention weights also bring model explainability.
As data are increasingly being stored in different silos and societies becoming more aware of data privacy issues, the traditional centralized training of artificial intelligence (AI) models is facing efficiency and privacy challenges. Recently, federated learning (FL) has emerged as an alternative solution and continue to thrive in this new reality. Existing FL protocol design has been shown to be vulnerable to adversaries within or outside of the system, compromising data privacy and system robustness. Besides training powerful global models, it is of paramount importance to design FL systems that have privacy guarantees and are resistant to different types of adversaries. In this paper, we conduct the first comprehensive survey on this topic. Through a concise introduction to the concept of FL, and a unique taxonomy covering: 1) threat models; 2) poisoning attacks and defenses against robustness; 3) inference attacks and defenses against privacy, we provide an accessible review of this important topic. We highlight the intuitions, key techniques as well as fundamental assumptions adopted by various attacks and defenses. Finally, we discuss promising future research directions towards robust and privacy-preserving federated learning.
The chronological order of user-item interactions can reveal time-evolving and sequential user behaviors in many recommender systems. The items that users will interact with may depend on the items accessed in the past. However, the substantial increase of users and items makes sequential recommender systems still face non-trivial challenges: (1) the hardness of modeling the short-term user interests; (2) the difficulty of capturing the long-term user interests; (3) the effective modeling of item co-occurrence patterns. To tackle these challenges, we propose a memory augmented graph neural network (MA-GNN) to capture both the long- and short-term user interests. Specifically, we apply a graph neural network to model the item contextual information within a short-term period and utilize a shared memory network to capture the long-range dependencies between items. In addition to the modeling of user interests, we employ a bilinear function to capture the co-occurrence patterns of related items. We extensively evaluate our model on five real-world datasets, comparing with several state-of-the-art methods and using a variety of performance metrics. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our model for the task of Top-K sequential recommendation.
Federated learning (FL) is a machine learning setting where many clients (e.g. mobile devices or whole organizations) collaboratively train a model under the orchestration of a central server (e.g. service provider), while keeping the training data decentralized. FL embodies the principles of focused data collection and minimization, and can mitigate many of the systemic privacy risks and costs resulting from traditional, centralized machine learning and data science approaches. Motivated by the explosive growth in FL research, this paper discusses recent advances and presents an extensive collection of open problems and challenges.
In recent years, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), which can naturally integrate node information and topological structure, have been demonstrated to be powerful in learning on graph data. These advantages of GNNs provide great potential to advance social recommendation since data in social recommender systems can be represented as user-user social graph and user-item graph; and learning latent factors of users and items is the key. However, building social recommender systems based on GNNs faces challenges. For example, the user-item graph encodes both interactions and their associated opinions; social relations have heterogeneous strengths; users involve in two graphs (e.g., the user-user social graph and the user-item graph). To address the three aforementioned challenges simultaneously, in this paper, we present a novel graph neural network framework (GraphRec) for social recommendations. In particular, we provide a principled approach to jointly capture interactions and opinions in the user-item graph and propose the framework GraphRec, which coherently models two graphs and heterogeneous strengths. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework GraphRec. Our code is available at \url{//github.com/wenqifan03/GraphRec-WWW19}
With the information explosion of news articles, personalized news recommendation has become important for users to quickly find news that they are interested in. Existing methods on news recommendation mainly include collaborative filtering methods which rely on direct user-item interactions and content based methods which characterize the content of user reading history. Although these methods have achieved good performances, they still suffer from data sparse problem, since most of them fail to extensively exploit high-order structure information (similar users tend to read similar news articles) in news recommendation systems. In this paper, we propose to build a heterogeneous graph to explicitly model the interactions among users, news and latent topics. The incorporated topic information would help indicate a user's interest and alleviate the sparsity of user-item interactions. Then we take advantage of graph neural networks to learn user and news representations that encode high-order structure information by propagating embeddings over the graph. The learned user embeddings with complete historic user clicks capture the users' long-term interests. We also consider a user's short-term interest using the recent reading history with an attention based LSTM model. Experimental results on real-world datasets show that our proposed model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on news recommendation.
Graph signals are signals with an irregular structure that can be described by a graph. Graph neural networks (GNNs) are information processing architectures tailored to these graph signals and made of stacked layers that compose graph convolutional filters with nonlinear activation functions. Graph convolutions endow GNNs with invariance to permutations of the graph nodes' labels. In this paper, we consider the design of trainable nonlinear activation functions that take into consideration the structure of the graph. This is accomplished by using graph median filters and graph max filters, which mimic linear graph convolutions and are shown to retain the permutation invariance of GNNs. We also discuss modifications to the backpropagation algorithm necessary to train local activation functions. The advantages of localized activation function architectures are demonstrated in four numerical experiments: source localization on synthetic graphs, authorship attribution of 19th century novels, movie recommender systems and scientific article classification. In all cases, localized activation functions are shown to improve model capacity.
Attributed network embedding aims to learn low-dimensional node representations from both network structure and node attributes. Existing methods can be categorized into two groups: (1) the first group learns two separated node representations from network structure and node attribute respectively and concatenating them together; (2) the other group obtains node representations by translating node attributes into network structure or vice versa. However, both groups have their drawbacks. The first group neglects the correlation between these two types of information, while the second group assumes strong dependence between network structure and node attributes. In this paper, we address attributed network embedding from a novel perspective, i.e., learning representation of a target node via modeling its attributed local subgraph. To achieve this goal, we propose a novel graph auto-encoder framework, namely GraphAE. For a target node, GraphAE first aggregates the attribute information from its attributed local subgrah, obtaining its low-dimensional representation. Next, GraphAE diffuses its representation to nodes in its local subgraph to reconstruct their attribute information. Our proposed perspective transfroms the problem of learning node representations into the problem of modeling the context information manifested in both network structure and node attributes, thus having high capacity to learn good node representations for attributed network. Extensive experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art network approaches at the tasks of link prediction and node classification.
Precise user and item embedding learning is the key to building a successful recommender system. Traditionally, Collaborative Filtering(CF) provides a way to learn user and item embeddings from the user-item interaction history. However, the performance is limited due to the sparseness of user behavior data. With the emergence of online social networks, social recommender systems have been proposed to utilize each user's local neighbors' preferences to alleviate the data sparsity for better user embedding modeling. We argue that, for each user of a social platform, her potential embedding is influenced by her trusted users. As social influence recursively propagates and diffuses in the social network, each user's interests change in the recursive process. Nevertheless, the current social recommendation models simply developed static models by leveraging the local neighbors of each user without simulating the recursive diffusion in the global social network, leading to suboptimal recommendation performance. In this paper, we propose a deep influence propagation model to stimulate how users are influenced by the recursive social diffusion process for social recommendation. For each user, the diffusion process starts with an initial embedding that fuses the related features and a free user latent vector that captures the latent behavior preference. The key idea of our proposed model is that we design a layer-wise influence propagation structure to model how users' latent embeddings evolve as the social diffusion process continues. We further show that our proposed model is general and could be applied when the user~(item) attributes or the social network structure is not available. Finally, extensive experimental results on two real-world datasets clearly show the effectiveness of our proposed model, with more than 13% performance improvements over the best baselines.