# PerFedRec++: Enhancing Personalized Federated Recommendation with Self-Supervised Pre-Training

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.06622 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06622/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 11 May 2023.

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Personalized Federated Collaborative Filtering: A Variational AutoEncoder Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08931/) (2024)
- [A Comprehensive Data-centric Overview of Federated Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16541/) (2025)
- [Privacy in LLM-based Recommendation: Recent Advances and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01363/) (2024)
- [Personalized Recommendation Models in Federated Settings: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07101/) (2025)
- [Federated Continual Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04792/) (2025)
- [A Scenario-Oriented Survey of Federated Recommender Systems: Techniques, Challenges, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19620/) (2025)
- [Empowering Contrastive Federated Sequential Recommendation with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09306/) (2026)
- [Sharpness-Aware Minimization for Generalized Embedding Learning in Federated Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11503/) (2026)
- [FastPFRec: A Fast Personalized Federated Recommendation with Secure Sharing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20283/) (2026)
- [Joint Behavior-guided and Modality-coherence Conditional Graph Diffusion Denoising for Multi Modal Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03654/) (2026)
- [MMP-Refer: Multimodal Path Retrieval-augmented LLMs For Explainable Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03666/) (2026)
- [User Representation via Cross Multi-source Behavior Pre-training for Mobile Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01057/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Federated recommendation systems employ federated learning techniques to safeguard user privacy by transmitting model parameters instead of raw user data between user devices and the central server. Nevertheless, the current federated recommender system faces challenges such as heterogeneity and personalization, model performance degradation, and communication bottleneck. Previous studies have attempted to address these issues, but none have been able to solve them simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, named PerFedRec++, to enhance the personalized federated recommendation with self-supervised pre-training. Specifically, we utilize the privacy-preserving mechanism of federated recommender systems to generate two augmented graph views, which are used as contrastive tasks in self-supervised graph learning to pre-train the model. Pre-training enhances the performance of federated models by improving the uniformity of representation learning. Also, by providing a better initial state for federated training, pre-training makes the overall training converge faster, thus alleviating the heavy communication burden. We then construct a collaborative graph to learn the client representation through a federated graph neural network. Based on these learned representations, we cluster users into different user groups and learn personalized models for each cluster. Each user learns a personalized model by combining the global federated model, the cluster-level federated model, and its own fine-tuned local model. Experiments on three real-world datasets show that our proposed method achieves superior performance over existing methods.