# Federated Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network for Privacy-preserving Recommendation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.11730 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11730/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [Modeling Relational Data with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06103/) (2017)
- [LightGCN: Simplifying and Powering Graph Convolution Network for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.02126/) (2020)
- [Heterogeneous Graph Attention Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07293/) (2019)
- [Neural Graph Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08108/) (2019)
- [Heterogeneous Graph Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01332/) (2020)
- [MAGNN: Metapath Aggregated Graph Neural Network for Heterogeneous Graph Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.01680/) (2020)
- [Heterogeneous Information Network Embedding for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10730/) (2017)
- [Self-supervised Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network with Co-contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09111/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Heterogeneous Graph Embedding: Methods, Techniques, Applications and Sources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14867/) (2020)
- [A Survey of Heterogeneous Information Network Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04854/) (2015)
- [Secure Federated Matrix Factorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05108/) (2019)
- [FedGNN: Federated Graph Neural Network for Privacy-Preserving Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04925/) (2021)
- [Federated Social Recommendation with Graph Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.10778/) (2021)
- [Personalized Federated Recommendation via Joint Representation Learning, User Clustering, and Model Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.09375/) (2022)
- [Interaction-level Membership Inference Attack Against Federated Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10964/) (2023)
- [Differential Private Knowledge Transfer for Privacy-Preserving Cross-Domain Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04893/) (2022)
- [Semi-decentralized Federated Ego Graph Learning for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10900/) (2023)
- [Comprehensive Privacy Analysis on Federated Recommender System against Attribute Inference Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11857/) (2022)
- [Dual Personalization on Federated Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08143/) (2023)
- [Contrastive Collaborative Filtering for Cold-Start Item Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02151/) (2023)
- [Shared MF: A privacy-preserving recommendation system](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.07759/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [AdaFGL: A New Paradigm for Federated Node Classification with Topology Heterogeneity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11750/) (2024)
- [OpenFGL: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Federated Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16288/) (2024)
- [Safety in Graph Machine Learning: Threats and Safeguards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11034/) (2024)
- [A Comprehensive Data-centric Overview of Federated Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16541/) (2025)
- [Toward Graph-Tokenizing Large Language Models with Reconstructive Graph Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01385/) (2026)
- [Rethinking Byzantine Robustness in Federated Recommendation from Sparse Aggregation Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03301/) (2025)
- [Personalized One-shot Federated Graph Learning for Heterogeneous Clients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11304/) (2024)
- [Graph Tokenization for Bridging Graphs and Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11099/) (2026)
- [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)
- [Graph Federated Learning for Personalized Privacy Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06208/) (2025)
- [Graph Privacy: A Heterogeneous Federated GNN for Trans-Border Financial Data Circulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00257/) (2025)
- [HeteroBA: A Structure-Manipulating Backdoor Attack on Heterogeneous Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21140/) (2025)
- [Far From Sight, Far From Mind: Inverse Distance Weighting for Graph Federated Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01285/) (2025)
- [Spattack: Subgroup Poisoning Attacks on Federated Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06258/) (2025)
- [A Scenario-Oriented Survey of Federated Recommender Systems: Techniques, Challenges, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19620/) (2025)
- [HeteroHBA: A Generative Structure-Manipulating Backdoor Attack on Heterogeneous Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.24665/) (2025)
- [Low-pass Personalized Subgraph Federated Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20338/) (2026)
- [Riemannian Graph Tokenizer for Structural Knowledge Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.15427/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The heterogeneous information network (HIN), which contains rich semantics depicted by meta-paths, has emerged as a potent tool for mitigating data sparsity in recommender systems. Existing HIN-based recommender systems operate under the assumption of centralized storage and model training. However, real-world data is often distributed due to privacy concerns, leading to the semantic broken issue within HINs and consequent failures in centralized HIN-based recommendations. In this paper, we suggest the HIN is partitioned into private HINs stored on the client side and shared HINs on the server. Following this setting, we propose a federated heterogeneous graph neural network (FedHGNN) based framework, which facilitates collaborative training of a recommendation model using distributed HINs while protecting user privacy. Specifically, we first formalize the privacy definition for HIN-based federated recommendation (FedRec) in the light of differential privacy, with the goal of protecting user-item interactions within private HIN as well as users' high-order patterns from shared HINs. To recover the broken meta-path based semantics and ensure proposed privacy measures, we elaborately design a semantic-preserving user interactions publishing method, which locally perturbs user's high-order patterns and related user-item interactions for publishing. Subsequently, we introduce an HGNN model for recommendation, which conducts node- and semantic-level aggregations to capture recovered semantics. Extensive experiments on four datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms existing methods by a substantial margin (up to 34% in HR@10 and 42% in NDCG@10) under a reasonable privacy budget.