FedReady: Bounded Agents for Federation Formation

Abstract

Federated learning (FL) runtimes standardize aggregation and deployment, but each new study still requires federation formation: selecting task-eligible sites and preparing their local data and task code for federated training or analysis. This preparation recurs when the target changes, while raw records and site-private mappings are excluded from cross-site FL messages. We present FedReady, a system that performs federation formation with bounded LLM agents. Agents propose shared contracts, local adapters, and task code; the runtime owns workflow state and accepts artifacts only after checks tied to their digests. Candidate site discovery prioritizes recall; local eligibility verification checks task support before site admission. Once participating sites and artifacts are fixed, conventional federated training or analysis proceeds without readiness agents. Across 39 simulated retinal sites and four tasks, discovery reaches recall 1.00 at precision 0.65; local eligibility verification removes all 17 false positives without losing an eligible site-task pair. The participating sites supply 45,575 task-record instances and complete four 100-round jobs, including one with a runtime-generated contract. Across ten patient cohorts, preparation supports seven patient populations and holds endpoints at three sources as unsupported. Comparison with manually prepared reference populations and analysis (the manual reference) gives a maximum survival-curve difference of 0.001133. We also analyze 19 development failures, targeted classification ablations, and standalone and heterogeneous agent configurations. These results establish the feasibility of task-specific data preparation before ordinary FL training or analysis.