Breaking the Aggregation Bottleneck in Federated Recommendation: A Personalized Model Merging Approach

Abstract

Federated recommendation (FR) facilitates collaborative training by aggregating local models from massive devices, enabling client-specific personalization while ensuring privacy. However, we empirically and theoretically demonstrate that server-side aggregation can undermine client-side personalization, leading to suboptimal performance, i.e., the aggregation bottleneck. This issue stems from the inherent heterogeneity across numerous clients in FR, which drives the global model to deviate from local optima. To this end, we propose FedEM, which elastically merges the global and local models to compensate for impaired personalization. Unlike existing personalized federated recommendation (pFR) methods, FedEM (1) investigates the aggregation bottleneck in FR through theoretical insights, rather than relying on heuristic analysis; (2) leverages off-the-shelf local models rather than designing additional mechanisms to boost personalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method preserves client personalization during collaborative training, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines.