Large Language Model (LLM)-based generative recommendation has achieved notable success, yet its practical deployment is costly particularly due to excessive inference latency caused by autoregressive decoding. For lossless LLM decoding acceleration, Speculative Decoding (SD) has emerged as a promising solution. However, applying SD to generative recommendation presents unique challenges due to the requirement of generating top-K items (i.e., K distinct token sequences) as a recommendation list by beam search. This leads to more stringent verification in SD, where all the top-K sequences from the target LLM must be successfully drafted by the draft model at each decoding step. To alleviate this, we consider 1) boosting top-K sequence alignment between the draft model and the target LLM, and 2) relaxing the verification strategy to reduce trivial LLM calls. To this end, we propose an alignment framework named AtSpeed, which presents the AtSpeed-S optimization objective for top-K alignment under the strict top-K verification. Moreover, we introduce a relaxed sampling verification strategy that allows high-probability non-top-K drafted sequences to be accepted, significantly reducing LLM calls. Correspondingly, we propose AtSpeed-R for top-K alignment under this relaxed sampling verification. Empirical results on two real-world datasets demonstrate that AtSpeed significantly accelerates LLM-based generative recommendation, e.g., near 2x speedup under strict top-K verification and up to 2.5x speedup under relaxed sampling verification. The codes and datasets are available at~\url{https://github.com/Linxyhaha/AtSpeed}.

Large Language Model-based generative recommendation (LLMRec) has achieved notable success, but it suffers from high inference latency due to massive computational overhead and memory pressure of KV Cache. Existing KV Cache reduction methods face critical limitations: cache compression offers marginal acceleration given recommendation tasks' short decoding steps, while prompt compression risks discarding vital interaction history. Through systematic analysis of attention patterns in LLMRec, we uncover two pivotal insights: 1) layer-wise attention sparsity inversion where early layers retain dense informative patterns while later layers exhibit high redundancy, and 2) dual attention sinks phenomenon where attention scores concentrate on both head and tail tokens of input sequences. Motivated by these insights, we propose EARN, an efficient inference framework that leverages the early layers to compress information into register tokens placed at the input sequence boundaries, then focuses solely on these tokens in the subsequent layers. Extensive experiments on three datasets, two LLMRec methods and two LLM architectures demonstrate EARN's superiority, achieving up to 3.79x speedup and 80.8% KV Cache reduction with better accuracy than the general finetuning approach. Our work bridges the efficiency-effectiveness gap in LLMRec, offering practical deployment advantages for industrial scenarios.

Abstract Federated recommender systems (FedRecs) have garnered increasing attention recently, thanks to their privacy-preserving benefits. However, the decentralized and open characteristics of current FedRecs present at least two dilemmas. First, the performance of FedRecs is compromised due to highly sparse on-device data for each client. Second, the system’s robustness is undermined by the vulnerability to model poisoning attacks launched by malicious users. In this paper, we introduce a novel contrastive learning framework designed to fully leverage the client’s sparse data through embedding augmentation, referred to as CL4FedRec. Unlike previous contrastive learning approaches in FedRecs that necessitate clients to share their private parameters, our CL4FedRec aligns with the basic FedRec learning protocol, ensuring compatibility with most existing FedRec implementations. We then evaluate the robustness of FedRecs equipped with CL4FedRec by subjecting it to several state-of-the-art model poisoning attacks. Surprisingly, our observations reveal that contrastive learning tends to exacerbate the vulnerability of FedRecs to these attacks. This is attributed to the enhanced embedding uniformity, making the polluted target item embedding easily proximate to popular items. Based on this insight, we propose an enhanced and robust version of CL4FedRec (rCL4FedRec) by introducing a regularizer to maintain the distance among item embeddings with different popularity levels. Extensive experiments conducted on four commonly used recommendation datasets demonstrate that rCL4FedRec significantly enhances both the model’s performance and the robustness of FedRecs.

Sequential recommender systems, as a specialized branch of recommender systems that can capture users’ dynamic preferences for more accurate and timely recommendations, have made significant progress. Recently, due to increasing concerns about user data privacy, some researchers have implemented federated learning for sequential recommendation, a.k.a., Federated Sequential Recommender Systems (FedSeqRecs), in which a public sequential recommender model is shared and frequently transmitted between a central server and clients to achieve collaborative learning. Although these solutions mitigate user privacy to some extent, they present two significant limitations that affect their practical usability: (1) They require a globally shared sequential recommendation model. However, in real-world scenarios, the recommendation model constitutes a critical intellectual property for platform and service providers. Therefore, service providers may be reluctant to disclose their meticulously developed models. (2) The communication costs are high as they correlate with the number of model parameters. This becomes particularly problematic as the current FedSeqRec will be inapplicable when sequential recommendation marches into a large language model era. To overcome the above challenges, this article proposes a parameter transmission-free federated sequential recommendation framework (PTF-FSR), which ensures both model and data privacy protection to meet the privacy needs of service providers and system users alike. Furthermore, since PTF-FSR only transmits prediction results under privacy protection, which are independent of model sizes, this new federated learning architecture can accommodate more complex and larger sequential recommendation models. Extensive experiments conducted on three widely used recommendation datasets, employing various sequential recommendation models from both ID-based and ID-free paradigms, demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization capability of our proposed framework. To facilitate future research in this direction, we release our code at https://github.com/hi-weiyuan/PTF-FSR .

Sequential recommendation has been widely studied in the recommendation domain since it can capture users’ temporal preferences and provide more accurate and timely recommendations. To address user privacy concerns, the combination of federated learning and sequential recommender systems (FedSeqRec) has gained growing attention. Unfortunately, the performance of FedSeqRec is still unsatisfactory because the models used in FedSeqRec have to be lightweight to accommodate communication bandwidth and clients’ on-device computational resource constraints. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have exhibited strong transferable and generalized language understanding abilities and therefore, in the NLP area, many downstream tasks now utilize LLMs as a service to achieve superior performance without constructing complex models. Inspired by this successful practice, we propose a generic FedSeqRec framework, FELLAS, which aims to enhance FedSeqRec by utilizing LLMs as an external service. Specifically, FELLAS employs an LLM server to provide both item-level and sequence-level representation assistance. The item-level representation service is queried by the central server to enrich the original ID-based item embedding with textual information, while the sequence-level representation service is accessed by each client. However, invoking the sequence-level representation service requires clients to send sequences to the external LLM server. To safeguard privacy, we implement \(d_{\mathcal{X}}\) -privacy satisfied sequence perturbation, which protects clients’ sensitive data with guarantees. Additionally, a contrastive learning-based method is designed to transfer knowledge from the noisy sequence representation to clients’ sequential recommendation models. Furthermore, to empirically validate the privacy protection capability of FELLAS, we propose two interacted item inference attacks, considering the threats posed by the LLM server and the central server acting as curious-but-honest adversaries in cooperation. Extensive experiments conducted on three datasets with two widely used sequential recommendation models demonstrate the effectiveness and privacy-preserving capability of FELLAS.

With the growing concerns regarding user data privacy, Federated Recommender System (FedRec) has garnered significant attention recently due to its privacy-preserving capabilities. Existing FedRecs generally adhere to a learning protocol in which a central server shares a global recommendation model with clients, and participants achieve collaborative learning by frequently communicating the model's public parameters. Nevertheless, this learning framework has two drawbacks that limit its practical usability: (1) It necessitates a global-sharing recommendation model; however, in real-world scenarios, information related to the recommendation model, including its algorithm and parameters, constitutes the platforms' intellectual property. Hence, service providers are unlikely to release such information actively. (2) The communication costs of model parameter transmission are expensive since the model parameters are usually high-dimensional matrices. With the model size increasing, the communication burden will be the bottleneck for such traditional FedRecs. Given the above limitations, this paper introduces a novel parameter transmission-free federated recommendation framework that balances the protection between users' data privacy and platforms' model privacy, namely PTF-FedRec. Unlike traditional FedRecs, participants in PTF-FedRec collaboratively exchange knowledge by sharing their predictions within a privacy-preserving mechanism. Through this approach, the central server can learn a recommender model without disclosing its model parameters or accessing clients' raw data, preserving both the server's model privacy and users' data privacy. Besides, since clients and the central server only need to communicate prediction scores which are just a few real numbers, the communication overhead is significantly reduced compared to traditional FedRecs. Extensive experiments conducted on three commonly used recommendation datasets with three recommendation models demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency, and generalization of our proposed federated recommendation framework.

Cross-Domain Recommendation (CDR) stands as a pivotal technology addressing issues of data sparsity and cold start by transferring general knowledge from the source to the target domain. However, existing CDR models suffer limitations in adaptability across various scenarios due to their inherent complexity. To tackle this challenge, recent advancements introduce universal CDR models that leverage shared embeddings to capture general knowledge across domains and transfer it through "Multi-task Learning'' or "Pre-train, Fine-tune'' paradigms. However, these models often overlook the broader structural topology that spans domains and fail to align training objectives, potentially leading to negative transfer. To address these issues, we propose a motif-based prompt learning framework, MOP, which introducesmotif-based shared embeddings to encapsulate generalized domain knowledge, catering to both intra-domain and inter-domain CDR tasks. Specifically, we devise three typical motifs: butterfly, triangle, and random walk, and encode them through a Motif-based Encoder to obtain motif-based shared embeddings. Moreover, we train MOP under the "Pre-training & Prompt Tuning'' paradigm. By unifying pre-training and recommendation tasks as a common motif-based similarity learning task and integrating adaptable prompt parameters to guide the model in downstream recommendation tasks, MOP excels in transferring domain knowledge effectively. Experimental results on four distinct CDR tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of MOP than the state-of-the-art models.

Recommendation services play a pivotal role in financial decision-making and multimedia content services, as they suggest investment operations and personalized items to users, typically characterized by multi-modal features such as visual, textual, and acoustic attributes. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), demonstrating the immense potential for graph representation learning and recommendation systems, are capable of learning user/item embeddings by taking into account the graph topological structure and the multi-modal node features. Yet, a substantial number of multi-modal recommendation studies have seemingly ignored the inherent bias among different modalities during feature fusion, consequently leading to sub-optimal embeddings for items with multi-modal features. To mitigate this issue, we propose a novel multi-modal recommendation framework that integrates GNNs with deep mutual learning techniques, termed GNNMR. GNNMR uses the mutual knowledge distillation technique to collaboratively train multiple uni-modal bipartite user-item graphs. Each GNN is trained specifically on the uni-modal user-item bipartite graph, which is separated from the original multi-modal user-item bipartite graph, to generate uni-modal embeddings. These uni-modal embeddings then act as mutual supervision signals, allowing the model to uncover and synchronize the latent semantic relationships among different modalities. Subsequently, the model can conduct inference in an ensemble manner, leveraging uni-modal embeddings from diverse modalities. Experimental results on two real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed GNNMR outperforms other multi-modal recommendation methods in the Top-K recommendation task.

Federated recommender systems (FedRecs) have been widely explored recently due to their capability to safeguard user data privacy. These systems enable a central server to collaboratively learn recommendation models by sharing public parameters with clients, providing privacy-preserving solutions. However, this collaborative approach also creates a vulnerability that allows adversaries to manipulate FedRecs. Existing works on FedRec security already reveal that items can easily be promoted by malicious users via model poisoning attacks, but all of them mainly focus on FedRecs with only collaborative information (i.e., user–item interactions). We contend that these attacks are effective primarily due to the data sparsity of collaborative signals. In light of this, we propose a method to address data sparsity and model poisoning threats by incorporating product visual information. Intriguingly, our empirical findings demonstrate that the inclusion of visual information renders all existing model poisoning attacks ineffective. Nevertheless, the integration of visual information also introduces a new avenue for adversaries to manipulate federated recommender systems, as this information typically originates from external sources. To assess such threats, we propose a novel form of poisoning attack tailored for visually aware FedRecs, namely image poisoning attacks, where adversaries can gradually modify the uploaded image with human-unaware perturbations to manipulate item ranks during the FedRecs’ training process. Moreover, we provide empirical evidence showcasing a heightened threat when image poisoning attacks are combined with model poisoning attacks, resulting in easier manipulation of the federated recommendation systems. To ensure the safe utilization of visual information, we employ a diffusion model in visually aware FedRecs to purify each uploaded image and detect the adversarial images. Extensive experiments conducted with two FedRecs on two datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of our proposed attacks and defenses.

The marriage of federated learning and recommender system (FedRec) has been widely used to address the growing data privacy concerns in personalized recommendation services. In FedRecs, users’ attribute information and behavior data (i.e., user-item interaction data) are kept locally on their personal devices, therefore, it is considered a fairly secure approach to protect user privacy. As a result, the privacy issue of FedRecs is rarely explored. Unfortunately, several recent studies reveal that FedRecs are vulnerable to user attribute inference attacks, highlighting the privacy concerns of FedRecs. In this paper, we further investigate the privacy problem of user behavior data (i.e., user-item interactions) in FedRecs. Specifically, we perform the first systematic study on interaction-level membership inference attacks on FedRecs. An interaction-level membership inference attacker is first designed, and then the classical privacy protection mechanism, Local Differential Privacy (LDP), is adopted to defend against the membership inference attack. Unfortunately, the empirical analysis shows that LDP is not effective against such new attacks unless the recommendation performance is largely compromised. To mitigate the interaction-level membership attack threats, we design a simple yet effective defense method to significantly reduce the attacker’s inference accuracy without losing recommendation performance. Extensive experiments are conducted with two widely used FedRecs (Fed-NCF and Fed-LightGCN) on three real-world recommendation datasets (MovieLens-100K, Steam-200K, and Amazon Cell Phone), and the experimental results show the effectiveness of our solutions.

On-device session-based recommendation systems have been achieving increasing attention on account of the low energy/resource consumption and privacy protection while providing promising recommendation performance. To fit the powerful neural session-based recommendation models in resource-constrained mobile devices, tensor-train decomposition and its variants have been widely applied to reduce memory footprint by decomposing the embedding table into smaller tensors, showing great potential in compressing recommendation models. However, these model compression techniques significantly increase the local inference time due to the complex process of generating index lists and a series of tensor multiplications to form item embeddings. The resultant on-device recommender fails to provide real-time responses and recommendations. To improve the online recommendation efficiency, we propose to learn compositional encoding-based compact item representations. Specifically, each item is represented by a compositional code that consists of several codewords, and we learn embedding vectors to represent each codeword instead of each item. Then the composition of the codeword embedding vectors from different embedding matrices (i.e., codebooks) forms the item embedding. Since the size of codebooks can be extremely small, the recommender model is thus able to fit in resource-constrained devices and save the codebooks for fast local inference. Besides, to prevent the loss of model capacity caused by compression, we propose a bidirectional self-supervised knowledge distillation framework. Extensive experimental results on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that compared with existing methods, the proposed on-device recommender not only achieves an 8x inference speedup with a large compression ratio but also shows superior recommendation performance. The code is released at https://github.com/xiaxin1998/EODRec.