Agentic Trust Coordination for Federated Learning through Adaptive Thresholding and Autonomous Decision Making in Sustainable and Resilient Industrial Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces an agentic trust coordination framework for federated learning in industrial networks, enabling adaptive, context-aware trust adjustments to improve reliability without increasing communication costs.

Contribution

It proposes a novel server-side trust control layer that interprets signals and makes autonomous trust decisions, extending prior adaptive trust methods with context awareness.

Findings

Supports stable federated learning in industrial environments

Reduces reliance on fixed or heuristic trust parameters

Operates without modifying client training or communication protocols

Abstract

Distributed intelligence in industrial networks increasingly integrates sensing, communication, and computation across heterogeneous and resource constrained devices. Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative model training in such environments, but its reliability is affected by inconsistent client behaviour, noisy sensing conditions, and the presence of faulty or adversarial updates. Trust based mechanisms are commonly used to mitigate these effects, yet most remain statistical and heuristic, relying on fixed parameters or simple adaptive rules that struggle to accommodate changing operating conditions. This paper presents a lightweight agentic trust coordination approach for FL in sustainable and resilient industrial networks. The proposed Agentic Trust Control Layer operates as a server side control loop that observes trust related and system level signals, interprets their evolution over time, and applies targeted trust adjustments when instability is detected. The approach extends prior adaptive trust mechanisms by enabling context aware intervention decisions, rather than relying on fixed or purely reactive parameter updates. By explicitly separating observation, reasoning, and action, the proposed framework supports stable FL operation without modifying client side training or increasing communication overhead.