Federated Recommender Agents

LLM-powered recommender agents use reasoning and memory for personalization, but centralized access to user information raises privacy concerns, while isolated agents cannot learn from others' experiences. We formulate Federated Recommender Agents, a setting where local agents collaborate through natural-language knowledge while keeping interaction histories and personal memories local. We propose FedRecAgent, which enables this collaboration without updating LLM parameters. Its central challenge is determining which reasoning to integrate, since similar behavioral contexts can lead to different choices. FedRecAgent represents local experiences as Condition-Transition-Reasoning (C-T-R) units and hierarchically integrates reasoning by condition and transition. Within this structure, it consolidates related explanations and discriminates reasoning across alternative transitions. Each client maintains semantic and decision memories to capture preferences and conditional choice tendencies, guiding the retrieval and selection of shared reasoning for recommendation. Experiments across three domains under dense and sparse settings demonstrate improved recommendation performance over federated and LLM-based baselines, while ablations support the contributions of personalized memories and structured reasoning integration.