Multimodal-enhanced Federated Recommendation: A Group-wise Fusion Approach

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Chunxu, Zhang, Weipeng, Long, Guodong, Xue, Zhiheng, Xia, Riting, Yang, Bo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhang, Chunxu
Zhang, Weipeng
Long, Guodong
Xue, Zhiheng
Xia, Riting
Yang, Bo
author_facet Zhang, Chunxu
Zhang, Weipeng
Long, Guodong
Xue, Zhiheng
Xia, Riting
Yang, Bo
contents Federated Recommendation (FR) is a new learning paradigm to tackle the learn-to-rank problem in a privacy-preservation manner. How to integrate multi-modality features into federated recommendation is still an open challenge in terms of efficiency, distribution heterogeneity, and fine-grained alignment. To address these challenges, we propose a novel multimodal fusion mechanism in federated recommendation settings (GFMFR). Specifically, it offloads multimodal representation learning to the server, which stores item content and employs a high-capacity encoder to generate expressive representations, alleviating client-side overhead. Moreover, a group-aware item representation fusion approach enables fine-grained knowledge sharing among similar users while retaining individual preferences. The proposed fusion loss could be simply plugged into any existing federated recommender systems empowering their capability by adding multi-modality features. Extensive experiments on five public benchmark datasets demonstrate that GFMFR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art multimodal FR baselines.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_19955
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Multimodal-enhanced Federated Recommendation: A Group-wise Fusion Approach
Zhang, Chunxu
Zhang, Weipeng
Long, Guodong
Xue, Zhiheng
Xia, Riting
Yang, Bo
Information Retrieval
Federated Recommendation (FR) is a new learning paradigm to tackle the learn-to-rank problem in a privacy-preservation manner. How to integrate multi-modality features into federated recommendation is still an open challenge in terms of efficiency, distribution heterogeneity, and fine-grained alignment. To address these challenges, we propose a novel multimodal fusion mechanism in federated recommendation settings (GFMFR). Specifically, it offloads multimodal representation learning to the server, which stores item content and employs a high-capacity encoder to generate expressive representations, alleviating client-side overhead. Moreover, a group-aware item representation fusion approach enables fine-grained knowledge sharing among similar users while retaining individual preferences. The proposed fusion loss could be simply plugged into any existing federated recommender systems empowering their capability by adding multi-modality features. Extensive experiments on five public benchmark datasets demonstrate that GFMFR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art multimodal FR baselines.
title Multimodal-enhanced Federated Recommendation: A Group-wise Fusion Approach
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19955