FedConPE: Efficient Federated Conversational Bandits with Heterogeneous Clients

FedConPE: Efficient Federated Conversational Bandits with Heterogeneous Clients

Zhuohua Li, Maoli Liu, John C. S. Lui

Proceedings of the Thirty-Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 4533-4541. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2024/501

Conversational recommender systems have emerged as a potent solution for efficiently eliciting user preferences. These systems interactively present queries associated with "key terms" to users and leverage user feedback to estimate user preferences more efficiently. Nonetheless, most existing algorithms adopt a centralized approach. In this paper, we introduce FedConPE, a phase elimination-based federated conversational bandit algorithm, where M agents collaboratively solve a global contextual linear bandit problem with the help of a central server while ensuring secure data management. To effectively coordinate all the clients and aggregate their collected data, FedConPE uses an adaptive approach to construct key terms that minimize uncertainty across all dimensions in the feature space. Furthermore, compared with existing federated linear bandit algorithms, FedConPE offers improved computational and communication efficiency as well as enhanced privacy protections. Our theoretical analysis shows that FedConPE is minimax near-optimal in terms of cumulative regret. We also establish upper bounds for communication costs and conversation frequency. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that FedConPE outperforms existing conversational bandit algorithms while using fewer conversations.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: ML: Multi-armed bandits
Data Mining: DM: Recommender systems
Machine Learning: ML: Federated learning
Machine Learning: ML: Online learning