Underground mining operations depend on sensor networks to monitor critical parameters such as temperature, gas concentration, and miner movement, enabling timely hazard detection and safety decisions. However, transmitting raw sensor data to a centralized server for machine learning (ML) model training raises serious privacy and security concerns. Federated Learning (FL) offers a promising alternative by enabling decentralized model training without exposing sensitive local data. Yet, applying FL in underground mining presents unique challenges: (i) Adversaries may eavesdrop on shared model updates to launch model inversion or membership inference attacks, compromising data privacy and operational safety; (ii) Non-IID data distributions across mines and sensor noise can hinder model convergence. To address these issues, we propose FedMining--a privacy-preserving FL framework tailored for underground mining. FedMining introduces two core innovations: (1) a Decentralized Functional Encryption (DFE) scheme that keeps local models encrypted, thwarting unauthorized access and inference attacks; and (2) a balancing aggregation mechanism to mitigate data heterogeneity and enhance convergence. Evaluations on real-world mining datasets demonstrate FedMining's ability to safeguard privacy while maintaining high model accuracy and achieving rapid convergence with reduced communication and computation overhead. These advantages make FedMining both secure and practical for real-time underground safety monitoring.

As object detection models are increasingly deployed in cyber-physical systems such as autonomous vehicles (AVs) and surveillance platforms, ensuring their security against adversarial threats is essential. While prior work has explored adversarial attacks in the image domain, those attacks in the video domain remain largely unexamined, especially in the no-box setting. In this paper, we present α-Cloak, the first no-box adversarial attack on object detectors that operates entirely through the alpha channel of RGBA videos. α-Cloak exploits the alpha channel to fuse a malicious target video with a benign video, resulting in a fused video that appears innocuous to human viewers but consistently fools object detectors. Our attack requires no access to model architecture, parameters, or outputs, and introduces no perceptible artifacts. We systematically study the support for alpha channels across common video formats and playback applications, and design a fusion algorithm that ensures visual stealth and compatibility. We evaluate α-Cloak on five state-of-the-art object detectors, a vision-language model, and a multi-modal large language model (Gemini-2.0-Flash), demonstrating a 100% attack success rate across all scenarios. Our findings reveal a previously unexplored vulnerability in video-based perception systems, highlighting the urgent need for defenses that account for the alpha channel in adversarial settings.

Peer review is the cornerstone of academic publishing, yet the process is increasingly strained by rising submission volumes, reviewer overload, and expertise mismatches. Large language models (LLMs) are now being used as "reviewer aids," raising concerns about their fairness, consistency, and robustness against indirect prompt injection attacks. This paper presents a systematic evaluation of LLMs as academic reviewers. Using a curated dataset of 1,441 papers from ICLR 2023 and NeurIPS 2022, we evaluate GPT-5-mini against human reviewers across ratings, strengths, and weaknesses. The evaluation employs structured prompting with reference paper calibration, topic modeling, and similarity analysis to compare review content. We further embed covert instructions into PDF submissions to assess LLMs' susceptibility to prompt injection. Our findings show that LLMs consistently inflate ratings for weaker papers while aligning more closely with human judgments on stronger contributions. Moreover, while overarching malicious prompts induce only minor shifts in topical focus, explicitly field-specific instructions successfully manipulate specific aspects of LLM-generated reviews. This study underscores both the promises and perils of integrating LLMs into peer review and points to the importance of designing safeguards that ensure integrity and trust in future review processes.

Underground mining operations rely on distributed sensor networks to collect critical data daily, including mine temperature, toxic gas concentrations, and miner movements for hazard detection and operational decision-making. However, transmitting raw sensor data to a central server for training deep learning models introduces significant privacy risks, potentially exposing sensitive mine-specific information. Federated Learning (FL) offers a transformative solution by enabling collaborative model training while ensuring that raw data remains localized at each mine. Despite its advantages, FL in underground mining faces key challenges: (i) An attacker may compromise a mine's local model by employing techniques such as sign-flipping attacks or additive noise, leading to erroneous predictions; (ii) Low-quality (yet potentially valuable) data, caused by poor lighting conditions or sensor inaccuracies in mines may degrade the FL training process. In response, this paper proposes MineDetect, a defense FL framework that detects and isolates the attacked models while mitigating the impact of mines with low-quality data. MineDetect introduces two key innovations: (i) Detecting attacked models (maliciously manipulated) by developing a history-aware mechanism that leverages local and global averages of gradient updates; (ii) Identifying and eliminating adversarial influences from unreliable models (generated by clients with poor data quality) on the FL training process. Comprehensive simulations across diverse datasets demonstrate that MineDetect outperforms existing methods in both robustness and accuracy, even in challenging non-IID data scenarios. Its ability to counter adversarial influences while maintaining lower computational efficiency makes it a vital advancement for improving safety and operational effectiveness in underground mining.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized content creation across digital platforms, offering unprecedented capabilities in natural language generation and understanding. These models enable beneficial applications such as content generation, question and answering (Q&A), programming, and code reasoning. Meanwhile, they also pose serious risks by inadvertently or intentionally producing toxic, offensive, or biased content. This dual role of LLMs, both as powerful tools for solving real-world problems and as potential sources of harmful language, presents a pressing sociotechnical challenge. In this survey, we systematically review recent studies spanning unintentional toxicity, adversarial jailbreaking attacks, and content moderation techniques. We propose a unified taxonomy of LLM-related harms and defenses, analyze emerging multimodal and LLM-assisted jailbreak strategies, and assess mitigation efforts, including reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF), prompt engineering, and safety alignment. Our synthesis highlights the evolving landscape of LLM safety, identifies limitations in current evaluation methodologies, and outlines future research directions to guide the development of robust and ethically aligned language technologies.