From Privacy to Trust in the Agentic Era: A Taxonomy of Challenges in Trustworthy Federated Learning Through the Lens of Trust Report 2.0
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent threats, guardrails and governance
Abstract (arXiv)
Federated Learning (FL) enables privacy-preserving collaborative learning, yet deployments increasingly show that privacy guarantees alone do not sustain trust in high-risk settings. As FL systems move toward agentic AI, large language model-enabled, and dynamically adaptive architectures, trustworthiness becomes a system-level problem shaped by autonomous decision-making, non-stationary environments, and multi-stakeholder governance. We argue for Trustworthy FL (TFL), treating trust as a continuously maintained operating condition rather than a static model property. Through the lens of Trust Report 2.0, we propose a requirement-driven taxonomy of challenges grounded in TAI and explicitly extended to account for control-plane decisions, agency, and system dynamics across the federated lifecycle. Building on this diagnosis, we introduce a coordination blueprint that structures cross-requirement trade-offs, decision justification, and governance alignment in TFL systems. To operationalize assurance, Trust Report 2.0 is instantiated as a lightweight, privacy-preserving artifact that surfaces decision-centric trust evidence without centralizing raw data. We illustrate applicability via healthcare as a stress-test domain, focusing on oncology FL under regulatory pressure and clinical risk.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 78 of its 188 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 21 Jul 2025.
Builds on
78 of 188 references.
References · 78
- 2016Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Datacited by 7,669
- 2019Advances and Open Problems in Federated Learningcited by 3,046
- 2018Federated Optimization in Heterogeneous Networkscited by 2,987
- 2019Federated Learning: Challenges, Methods, and Future Directionscited by 1,538
- 2019Machine Unlearningcited by 1,061
- 2019Deep Leakage from Gradientscited by 1,021
- 2020Tackling the Objective Inconsistency Problem in Heterogeneous Federated Optimizationcited by 906
- 2021Generalized Out-of-Distribution Detection: A Surveycited by 802
- 2020Out-of-Distribution Generalization via Risk Extrapolation (REx)cited by 742
- 2020Inverting Gradients -- How easy is it to break privacy in federated learning?cited by 712
- 2020Ensemble Distillation for Robust Model Fusion in Federated Learningcited by 682
- 2017Deep Gradient Compression: Reducing the Communication Bandwidth for Distributed Trainingcited by 478
38 more
- 2019Robust and Communication-Efficient Federated Learning from Non-IID Datacited by 419
- 2019Fair Resource Allocation in Federated Learningcited by 394
- 2019A Survey on Federated Learning Systems: Vision, Hype and Reality for Data Privacy and Protectioncited by 374
- 2018Client Selection for Federated Learning with Heterogeneous Resources in Mobile Edgecited by 352
- 2018Analyzing Federated Learning through an Adversarial Lenscited by 351
- 2019Robust Aggregation for Federated Learningcited by 317
- 2019A Little Is Enough: Circumventing Defenses For Distributed Learningcited by 288
- 2021A Survey of Human-in-the-loop for Machine Learningcited by 215
- 2021Trustworthy AI: From Principles to Practicescited by 207
- 2019Energy Efficient Federated Learning Over Wireless Communication Networkscited by 181
- 2025AI Agents vs. Agentic AI: A Conceptual Taxonomy, Applications and Challengescited by 169
- 2023Federated Learning for Generalization, Robustness, Fairness: A Survey and Benchmarkcited by 99
- 2020TiFL: A Tier-based Federated Learning Systemcited by 96
- 2022Survey on Federated Learning Threats: concepts, taxonomy on attacks and defences, experimental study and challengescited by 84
- 2021Differentially Private Federated Learning on Heterogeneous Datacited by 74
- 2022Client Selection in Federated Learning: Principles, Challenges, and Opportunitiescited by 62
- 2023Connecting the Dots in Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence: From AI Principles, Ethics, and Key Requirements to Responsible AI Systems and Regulationcited by 61
- 2020To Talk or to Work: Flexible Communication Compression for Energy Efficient Federated Learning over Heterogeneous Mobile Edge Devicescited by 46
- 2022Federated Unlearning for On-Device Recommendationcited by 43
- 2020Stochastic Client Selection for Federated Learning with Volatile Clientscited by 39
- 2023Efficient Personalized Federated Learning via Sparse Model-Adaptationcited by 38
- 2021Emerging Trends in Federated Learning: From Model Fusion to Federated X Learningcited by 35
- 2024Trust in AI: Progress, Challenges, and Future Directionscited by 35
- 2023Towards Personalized Federated Learning via Heterogeneous Model Reassemblycited by 31
- 2021Byzantine-robust Federated Learning through Collaborative Malicious Gradient Filteringcited by 30
- 2019Proof of Federated Learning: A Novel Energy-recycling Consensus Algorithmcited by 26
- 2021Learning Accurate and Interpretable Decision Rule Sets from Neural Networkscited by 25
- 2021Federated Causal Inference in Heterogeneous Observational Datacited by 24
- 2023A Survey of Trustworthy Federated Learning with Perspectives on Security, Robustness, and Privacycited by 24
- 2020Federated Learning for Resource-Constrained IoT Devices: Panoramas and State-of-the-artcited by 19
- 2020A Federated Learning Approach to Anomaly Detection in Smart Buildingscited by 17
- 2025Unlearning through Knowledge Overwriting: Reversible Federated Unlearning via Selective Sparse Adaptercited by 16
- 2024Threats and Defenses in Federated Learning Life Cycle: A Comprehensive Survey and Challengescited by 15
- 2024Trustworthy Distributed AI Systems: Robustness, Privacy, and Governancecited by 14
- 2024Vertical Federated Learning for Effectiveness, Security, Applicability: A Surveycited by 14
- 2024FOOGD: Federated Collaboration for Both Out-of-distribution Generalization and Detectioncited by 14
- 2019Provenance Data in the Machine Learning Lifecycle in Computational Science and Engineeringcited by 13
- 2022Distributed Learning of Generalized Linear Causal Networkscited by 13
50 most cited of 78 All 78 (JSON)
Built on by
Not cited yet.
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026Agentic Trust Coordination for Federated Learning through Adaptive Thresholding and Autonomous Decision Making in Sustainable and Resilient Industrial Networks
- 2026Agentic Federated Learning: The Future of Distributed Training Orchestration
- 2026Towards trustworthy agentic AI: a comprehensive survey of safety, robustness, privacy, and system security
- 2025Federated Learning: A Survey on Privacy-Preserving Collaborative Intelligence
- 2026TRUST: A Framework for Decentralized AI Service v.0.1
- 2025From Cloud-Native to Trust-Native: A Protocol for Verifiable Multi-Agent Systems
- 2026Trustworthy Agentic AI: A Comprehensive Cybersecurity and Systems Survey on Threat Landscapes, Defense Architectures, and Open Challenges
- 2021PPFL: Privacy-preserving Federated Learning with Trusted Execution Environments