FedWorld: Scope-Aware Federation of Agent World Models
2026-08-03 • Human-Computer Interaction
Human-Computer Interaction
AI summaryⓘ
The authors study how multiple AI agents can share knowledge about how the world works to help each other plan better actions. They point out that simply mixing all knowledge together can cause problems because the same action might have different effects in different settings. To fix this, they create FEDWORLD, a system that carefully checks which shared knowledge works for each agent’s situation before sharing it. Their tests show this method helps agents avoid mistakes and perform better on tasks.
Large Language ModelsFederated LearningWorld ModelTransition RulesKnowledge SharingPlanningNegative TransferClient-Server ModelMulti-Agent Systems
Authors
Yuchao Hou
Abstract
Large language model (LLM) agents learn world dynamics from local interaction experience to support subsequent planning and action selection. However, the experience available to a single client is often incomplete, which motivates sharing knowledge across clients. Existing federated methods mainly aggregate model parameters, while agent memory-sharing methods commonly pool trajectories, memories, or rules without checking whether they remain valid for each client. This assumption is problematic because the same abstract action may produce different effects under different policies, environments, or exception conditions. Consequently, a rule supported by most clients may overwrite correct knowledge held by a minority client. To address this problem, we propose FEDWORLD, a scope-aware federated world-model protocol that exchanges structured abstract transition rules. Each client converts private transitions into normalized rules, and the server aligns related rules to identify each rule supporting and contradicting evidence across clients. The resulting evidence determines whether a rule is shared, cluster-specific, private, or unresolved. Each target client retains its local rules and accepts federated updates only for uncovered cases whose inferred scope is compatible; ambiguous rules are withheld. Experiments on $τ$-bench and ALFWorld show that FEDWORLD reduces negative transfer under conflicting dynamics while retaining useful cross-client transfer, leading to fewer state regressions, repeated actions, and excess steps, as well as higher task success.