Dynamic Feature-Embedding Communication via Codebook Distillation for Federated Recommendation

Federated recommendation systems commonly protect user privacy by keeping user parameters on local devices, while exchanging item parameters for collaborative model training. However, such item parameters usually model items independently and suffer from both efficiency and effectiveness challenges, making communication costs grow with the item space and limiting cross-item generalization and robustness to noisy feedback. To address these limitations, we propose to model items via shared latent feature embeddings for communication. Residual Quantization (RQ) provides a natural way to instantiate this communication by representing each item with a short sequence of discrete code IDs, i.e., Semantic IDs (SIDs). However, directly applying centralized and static RQ-based recommendation to federated learning is non-trivial due to 1) private and biased historical interactions and 2) evolving collaborative information. We propose RQFedRec, an RQ-based federated recommendation framework for dynamic feature-embedding communication. To construct globally aligned codebooks without accessing private interactions, RQFedRec introduces an information distillation module. Each client first learns item embeddings that encode local collaborative information from private interactions, and then distills such information into feature-indexed codebooks under globally shared SIDs, making sparse and biased local signals more compatible with server aggregation. To adapt to evolving collaborative information, RQFedRec introduces a self-refining SID update module that dynamically refines global SID assignments from aggregated codebooks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RQFedRec improves recommendation performance and reduces communication costs without relying on semantic information, while further benefiting from public semantics when available. Code is available at https://github.com/Mingzhe-Han/RQFedRec.