Extending FAIR Principles with Observability for Trustworthy Federated Learning

Overview & Synopsis

Federated learning (FL) keeps data at its source, but locality alone does not make a federation trustworthy. Without sufficient observability, an aggregator cannot determine whether the client service was healthy, the local data pipeline was trustworthy, or contractual constraints were properly monitored during training. We take the position that trustworthy FL needs an evidence plane in addition to its model-update process. Each participant continuously summarizes local infrastructure, data into minimal, signed trust evidence associated with each FL round, while raw data, logs remain local. A local TinyLLM may assist in interpreting observability signals, deriving contextual evidence, and providing natural-language explanations to operators. We instantiate this vision through FAIR-O, an observability extension of FAIR principle. Rather than benchmarking FL accuracy, a three-level trust model has been proposed and a two-participant Python prototype demonstrates evidence generation and trust assessment. We further discuss future integration of FAIR-O Trust Evidence into participant selection, evidence weighting, and federated aggregation.