Improving Federated Graph Recommendation with Semantic Guidance

Abstract

Graph-based recommendation models effectively capture high-order collaborative signals from user--item interaction graphs. Federated learning (FL) enables privacy-preserving training across distributed clients. However, directly aggregating graph representations under FL is challenging: locally learned structural embeddings are not globally aligned under non-IID data distributions, and naive parameter averaging fails to recover cross-client relational structure. Existing federated graph-based approaches primarily rely on structural aggregation, yet overlook the global semantic knowledge encoded in large language models (LLMs). In this work, we propose a semantic--structural federated graph recommendation framework that leverages LLM embeddings to guide cross-client alignment. Each client learns user representations from its local interaction graph and summarizes typical interaction patterns into compact semantic vectors using a frozen LLM encoder. These vectors are sent to the server, which identifies semantically related patterns across different clients and combines their structural representations accordingly. The updated representations are then returned to clients to refine subsequent local training. This design enables collaboration guided by shared semantic understanding without exposing raw interaction data, preserving both recommendation accuracy and privacy. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate consistent improvements over existing federated graph-based baselines.