{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/ua-fedrec-untargeted-attack-on-federated-news","title":"UA-FedRec: Untargeted Attack on Federated News Recommendation","arxiv_id":"2202.06701","date":"2022-02-14","proceeding":null,"authors":["Jingwei Yi","Fangzhao Wu","Bin Zhu","Jing Yao","Zhulin Tao","Guangzhong Sun","Xing Xie"],"abstract":"News recommendation is critical for personalized news distribution. Federated news recommendation enables collaborative model learning from many clients without sharing their raw data. It is promising for privacy-preserving news recommendation. However, the security of federated news recommendation is still unclear. In this paper, we study this problem by proposing an untargeted attack called UA-FedRec. By exploiting the prior knowledge of news recommendation and federated learning, UA-FedRec can effectively degrade the model performance with a small percentage of malicious clients. First, the effectiveness of news recommendation highly depends on user modeling and news modeling. We design a news similarity perturbation method to make representations of similar news farther and those of dissimilar news closer to interrupt news modeling, and propose a user model perturbation method to make malicious user updates in opposite directions of benign updates to interrupt user modeling. Second, updates from different clients are typically aggregated by weighted-averaging based on their sample sizes. We propose a quantity perturbation method to enlarge sample sizes of malicious clients in a reasonable range to amplify the impact of malicious updates. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets show that UA-FedRec can effectively degrade the accuracy of existing federated news recommendation methods, even when defense is applied. Our study reveals a critical security issue in existing federated news recommendation systems and calls for research efforts to address the issue.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.06701v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2202.06701v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"ua-fedrec-untargeted-attack-on-federated-news","repo_url":"https://github.com/yjw1029/ua-fedrec","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"federated-learning","task_name":"Federated Learning"},{"task_slug":"news-recommendation","task_name":"News Recommendation"},{"task_slug":"privacy-preserving","task_name":"Privacy Preserving"},{"task_slug":"recommendation-systems","task_name":"Recommendation Systems"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}