Federated Explainable Artificial Intelligence: Roles, Architectures, Evaluation, and Open Challenges
Federated Learning (FL) enables privacy-preserving collaborative training across distributed data, but lacks model transparency. Explainable AI (XAI) addresses opacity. Their intersection, Federated Explainable AI (FedXAI), is systematically reviewed in this survey, highlighting explainability's shift from post-hoc tool to integral FL component. A taxonomy classifies methods by role, model type, scope, integration level, FL settings, and data heterogeneity. Evaluation practices lack standardized benchmarks. Key challenges include non-IID data, security threats, communication efficiency, continual learning, and domain knowledge integration.
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[Submitted on 15 Jun 2026]
Title:Federated Explainable Artificial Intelligence: Roles, Architectures, Evaluation, and Open Challenges
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Abstract:Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a key paradigm for privacy-preserving collaborative model training across distributed and heterogeneous data sources. By keeping raw data local, FL addresses data confidentiality concerns, yet it does not resolve the opacity of modern machine learning models. In parallel, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has gained attention for improving transparency, trust, and accountability, particularly in high-stakes domains. Their intersection has given rise to Federated Explainable Artificial Intelligence (FedXAI) paradigm, which aims to jointly satisfy privacy and explainability requirements. This survey provides a systematic review of FedXAI, highlighting the transition of explainability from a post-hoc tool to an integral component of the FL lifecycle. We show how explainability supports aggregation, personalization, robustness, coordination, and system-level decision making. To organize the literature, we introduce a taxonomy that classifies FedXAI methods by the role of explainability, model and explainer types, explanation scope, integration level, FL settings, and data heterogeneity. We review approaches ranging from model-agnostic explanations to interpretable federated models and explainability-aware aggregation mechanisms. We also examine evaluation practices and discuss the lack of standardized benchmarks and metrics for measuring explanation quality, stability, privacy leakage, and computational overhead. Finally, we identify key challenges, including explainability under non-IID data, explanation-centric security threats, communication-efficient XAI, continual FedXAI, and the integration of domain knowledge and regulatory constraints. By consolidating existing work and identifying key gaps, this survey serves as a reference framework for designing trustworthy, transparent, and privacy-preserving federated AI systems.
Comments: 68 pages, 4 figures
Subjects:
Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
MSC classes: 68T05, 68T07
ACM classes: I.2.6; I.2.11
Cite as: arXiv:2607.13045 [cs.LG]
(or arXiv:2607.13045v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.13045
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
Journal reference: Expert Systems with Applications, Volume 331, 2026, 133183
Related DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2026.133183
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Submission history
From: Masoume Gholizade [view email] [v1] Mon, 15 Jun 2026 21:02:31 UTC (474 KB)
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