Introduction
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 but 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 the Federated Explainable Artificial Intelligence (FedXAI) paradigm, which aims to jointly satisfy privacy and explainability requirements.
Literature Review
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 demonstrate 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.
Evaluation Practices
We also examine evaluation practices and discuss the lack of standardized benchmarks and metrics for measuring explanation quality, stability, privacy leakage, and computational overhead.
Challenges and Future Directions
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.
Blogger's Review: This article delves into the integration of federated learning and explainable AI, pointing the way for future research. Despite facing multiple challenges, the development of FedXAI is a crucial step towards achieving transparent AI systems under high privacy standards. Looking forward to breakthroughs in standardized evaluation and security in subsequent research.