FedFlex: Federated Learning for Diverse Netflix Recommendations

Abstract: Federated learning is a decentralized approach that enables collaborative model training across multiple devices while preserving data privacy. It has shown significant potential in various domains, including healthcare and personalized recommendation systems. However, most existing work on federated recommendation systems has focused primarily on improving accuracy, with limited attention to fairness and diversity. In this paper, we introduce FedFlex, a federated recommender system for Netflix-style TV series recommendations. FedFlex integrates two state-of-the-art matrix factorization algorithms for personalized fine-tuning. FedFlex also applies Maximal Marginal Relevance (MMR) to re-rank items and enhance diversity. We conduct extensive experiments comparing recommendations generated by SVD and BPR algorithms. In a live two-week user study, participants received two recommendation lists: List A, based on SVD or BPR, and List B, a re-ranked version emphasizing diversity. Participants were asked to click on the movies they were interested in watching. Our findings demonstrate that FedFlex effectively introduces diverse content, such as new genres, into recommendations without necessarily compromising user satisfaction.