# Auto-FL-Research: Agentic Search for Federated Learning Algorithms

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.01366 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01366/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Agentic AI for wireless networks, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 23 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jul 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Agentic AI for wireless networks](https://mlsanity.com/agents/agentic-ai-for-wireless-networks/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [Advances and Open Problems in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04977/) (2019)
- [Federated Optimization in Heterogeneous Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06127/) (2018)
- [3D U-Net: Learning Dense Volumetric Segmentation from Sparse Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06650/) (2016)
- [The AI Scientist: Towards Fully Automated Open-Ended Scientific Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06292/) (2024)
- [Adaptive Federated Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00295/) (2020)
- [LEAF: A Benchmark for Federated Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01097/) (2018)
- [Dual-stream Multiple Instance Learning Network for Whole Slide Image Classification with Self-supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08939/) (2020)
- [Agent Laboratory: Using LLM Agents as Research Assistants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04227/) (2025)
- [The AI Scientist-v2: Workshop-Level Automated Scientific Discovery via Agentic Tree Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08066/) (2025)
- [AutoML: A Survey of the State-of-the-Art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.00709/) (2019)
- [FLamby: Datasets and Benchmarks for Cross-Silo Federated Learning in Realistic Healthcare Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04620/) (2022)
- [NVIDIA FLARE: Federated Learning from Simulation to Real-World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13291/) (2022)
- [From Federated Learning to Federated Neural Architecture Search: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.05868/) (2020)
- [AutoFL: Enabling Heterogeneity-Aware Energy Efficient Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08147/) (2021)
- [Auto-FedAvg: Learnable Federated Averaging for Multi-Institutional Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10195/) (2021)
- [Auto-FedRL: Federated Hyperparameter Optimization for Multi-institutional Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06338/) (2022)
- [FedCompass: Efficient Cross-Silo Federated Learning on Heterogeneous Client Devices using a Computing Power Aware Scheduler](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14675/) (2023)
- [Revisiting Ensembling in One-Shot Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07182/) (2024)
- [EAIRA: Establishing a Methodology for Evaluating AI Models as Scientific Research Assistants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20309/) (2025)
- [Camyla: Scaling Autonomous Research in Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10696/) (2026)
- [Automated Federated Learning in Mobile Edge Networks -- Fast Adaptation and Convergence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12999/) (2023)
- [Hyper-parameter Optimization for Federated Learning with Step-wise Adaptive Mechanism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12244/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Federated learning (FL) research often depends on many small but consequential algorithmic choices: optimizer variants, server aggregation rules, local training schedules, normalization, regularization, and model architecture. These choices are expensive to explore manually and difficult to compare fairly when candidate changes can also alter the FL training or evaluation path. In this work, we present Auto-FL-Research (AFR), a constrained coding-agent workflow for FL algorithmic recipe search. Agents may propose and implement candidate training algorithms, including server aggregation rules, client update schedules, local objectives, and registered model variants, while task profiles fix the mutation surface, compute budget, communication contract, and final model evaluation. Each campaign records candidate scores, runtime, edited files, artifacts, and failure status. We evaluate AFR on five healthcare cross-silo FLamby tasks and on grouped-client profiles for the five fixed LEAF datasets plus the LEAF synthetic task. Five-seed repeat evaluations support gains on four FLamby tasks and five of six LEAF profiles, while also exposing seed-sensitive and search-selected failure cases. Same-budget controls show that several gains correspond to FL-recipe changes, whereas other improvements are recovered by fixed-surface scalar controls or fail under repeat or held-out evaluation. These mixed outcomes are part of the contribution: they show how agent-generated candidates can be separated into repeated FL mechanisms, fixed-surface tuning effects, and selected single-run artifacts.