Towards Fair Federated Recommendation Learning: Characterizing the Inter-Dependence of System and Data Heterogeneity

BSTRACT Federated learning (FL) is an effective mechanism for data privacy in recommender systems that runs machine learning model training on-device. While prior FL optimizations tackled the data and system heterogeneity challenges, they assume the two are independent of each other. This fundamental assumption is not reflective of real-world, large-scale recommender systems — data and system heterogeneity are tightly intertwined. This paper takes a data-driven approach to show the inter-dependence of data and system heterogeneity in real-world data and quantifies its impact on the overall model quality and fairness. We design a framework, RF2, to model the inter-dependence and evaluate its impact on state-of-the-art model optimization techniques for federated recommendation tasks. We demonstrate that the impact on fairness can be severe under realistic heterogeneity scenarios, by up to 15.8–41 × compared to a simple setup assumed in most (if not all) prior work. The result shows that modeling realistic system-induced data heterogeneity is essential to achieving fair federated recommendation learning.