From Privacy to Trust in the Agentic Era: A Taxonomy of Challenges in Trustworthy Federated Learning Through the Lens of Trust Report 2.0
Abstract
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.
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