Cross-Silo Federated Learning-to-Rank

Learning-to-rank (LTR) model has made a remarkable achievement. However, traditional training scheme for LTR model requires large amount of text data. Considering the increasing concerns about privacy protection, it is becoming infeasible to collect text data from multiple data owners as before, and thus data is forced to save separately. The separation turns data owners into data silos, among which the data can hardly exchange, causing LTR training severely compromised. Inspired by the recent progress in federated learning, a novel framework is proposed named cross-silo federated learning-to-rank (CS-F-LTR), which addresses two unique challenges faced by LTR when applied it to federated scenario. In order to deal with the cross-party feature generation problem, CS-F-LTR utilizes a sketch and differential privacy based method, which is much more efficient than encryption-based protocols meanwhile the accuracy loss is still guaranteed. To tackle with the missing label problem, CS-F-LTR relies on a semi-supervised learning mechanism that facilitates fast labeling with mutual labelers. Extensive experiments conducted on public datasets verify the effectiveness of the proposed framework. © Copyright 2021, Institute of Software, the Chinese Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.