defense 2026

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

Paul Shepherd 1, Tasos Dagiuklas 1, Bugra Alkan 1, Jonathan Rodriguez 2

0 citations

α

Published on arXiv

2603.25334

Data Poisoning Attack

OWASP ML Top 10 — ML02

Key Finding

Enables stable FL operation under changing conditions by replacing fixed trust thresholds with adaptive context-aware intervention decisions

Agentic Trust Control Layer

Novel technique introduced


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.


Key Contributions

  • Agentic Trust Control Layer that separates observation, reasoning, and action for context-aware trust adaptation in FL
  • Extension of ATSSSF framework with autonomous decision-making rather than fixed threshold rules
  • Server-side trust coordination mechanism requiring no client-side modifications or communication overhead

🛡️ Threat Analysis

Data Poisoning Attack

Defends federated learning against adversarial client updates and data poisoning attacks by implementing adaptive trust-based client filtering and contribution weighting at the server side.


Details

Domains
federated-learning
Model Types
federated
Threat Tags
training_timegrey_box
Applications
industrial iotedge computingdistributed sensing networks