DASH: Deception-Augmented Shared Mental Model for a Human-Machine Teaming System

We present DASH (Deception-Augmented Shared mental model for Human-machine teaming), a novel framework that enhances mission resilience by embedding proactive deception into Shared Mental Models (SMM). Designed for mission-critical applications such as surveillance and rescue, DASH introduces "bait tasks" to detect insider threats, e.g., compromised Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs), AI agents, or human analysts, before they degrade team performance. Upon detection, tailored recovery mechanisms are activated, including UGV system reinstallation, AI model retraining, or human analyst replacement. In contrast to existing SMM approaches that neglect insider risks, DASH improves both coordination and security. Empirical evaluations across four schemes (DASH, SMM-only, no-SMM, and baseline) show that DASH sustains approximately 80% mission success under high attack rates, eight times higher than the baseline. This work contributes a practical human-AI teaming framework grounded in shared mental models, a deception-based strategy for insider threat detection, and empirical evidence of enhanced robustness under adversarial conditions. DASH establishes a foundation for secure, adaptive human-machine teaming in contested environments.

MURIM: Multidimensional Reputation-based Incentive Mechanism for Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a leading privacy-preserving machine learning paradigm, enabling participants to share model updates instead of raw data. However, FL continues to face key challenges, including weak client incentives, privacy risks, and resource constraints. Assessing client reliability is essential for fair incentive allocation and ensuring that each client's data contributes meaningfully to the global model. To this end, we propose MURIM, a MUlti-dimensional Reputation-based Incentive Mechanism that jointly considers client reliability, privacy, resource capacity, and fairness while preventing malicious or unreliable clients from earning undeserved rewards. MURIM allocates incentives based on client contribution, latency, and reputation, supported by a reliability verification module. Extensive experiments on MNIST, FMNIST, and ADULT Income datasets demonstrate that MURIM achieves up to 18% improvement in fairness metrics, reduces privacy attack success rates by 5-9%, and improves robustness against poisoning and noisy-gradient attacks by up to 85% compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Overall, MURIM effectively mitigates adversarial threats, promotes fair and truthful participation, and preserves stable model convergence across heterogeneous and dynamic federated settings.

PRIVEE: Privacy-Preserving Vertical Federated Learning Against Feature Inference Attacks

Vertical Federated Learning (VFL) enables collaborative model training across organizations that share common user samples but hold disjoint feature spaces. Despite its potential, VFL is susceptible to feature inference attacks, in which adversarial parties exploit shared confidence scores (i.e., prediction probabilities) during inference to reconstruct private input features of other participants. To counter this threat, we propose PRIVEE (PRIvacy-preserving Vertical fEderated lEarning), a novel defense mechanism named after the French word privée, meaning "private." PRIVEE obfuscates confidence scores while preserving critical properties such as relative ranking and inter-score distances. Rather than exposing raw scores, PRIVEE shares only the transformed representations, mitigating the risk of reconstruction attacks without degrading model prediction accuracy. Extensive experiments show that PRIVEE achieves a threefold improvement in privacy protection compared to state-of-the-art defenses, while preserving full predictive performance against advanced feature inference attacks.

Sustainable Smart Farm Networks: Enhancing Resilience and Efficiency with Decision Theory-Guided Deep Reinforcement Learning

Solar sensor-based monitoring systems have become a crucial agricultural innovation, advancing farm management and animal welfare through integrating sensor technology, Internet-of-Things, and edge and cloud computing. However, the resilience of these systems to cyber-attacks and their adaptability to dynamic and constrained energy supplies remain largely unexplored. To address these challenges, we propose a sustainable smart farm network designed to maintain high-quality animal monitoring under various cyber and adversarial threats, as well as fluctuating energy conditions. Our approach utilizes deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to devise optimal policies that maximize both monitoring effectiveness and energy efficiency. To overcome DRL's inherent challenge of slow convergence, we integrate transfer learning (TL) and decision theory (DT) to accelerate the learning process. By incorporating DT-guided strategies, we optimize monitoring quality and energy sustainability, significantly reducing training time while achieving comparable performance rewards. Our experimental results prove that DT-guided DRL outperforms TL-enhanced DRL models, improving system performance and reducing training runtime by 47.5%.

OPUS-VFL: Incentivizing Optimal Privacy-Utility Tradeoffs in Vertical Federated Learning

Vertical Federated Learning (VFL) enables organizations with disjoint feature spaces but shared user bases to collaboratively train models without sharing raw data. However, existing VFL systems face critical limitations: they often lack effective incentive mechanisms, struggle to balance privacy-utility tradeoffs, and fail to accommodate clients with heterogeneous resource capabilities. These challenges hinder meaningful participation, degrade model performance, and limit practical deployment. To address these issues, we propose OPUS-VFL, an Optimal Privacy-Utility tradeoff Strategy for VFL. OPUS-VFL introduces a novel, privacy-aware incentive mechanism that rewards clients based on a principled combination of model contribution, privacy preservation, and resource investment. It employs a lightweight leave-one-out (LOO) strategy to quantify feature importance per client, and integrates an adaptive differential privacy mechanism that enables clients to dynamically calibrate noise levels to optimize their individual utility. Our framework is designed to be scalable, budget-balanced, and robust to inference and poisoning attacks. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets (MNIST, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100) demonstrate that OPUS-VFL significantly outperforms state-of-the-art VFL baselines in both efficiency and robustness. It reduces label inference attack success rates by up to 20%, increases feature inference reconstruction error (MSE) by over 30%, and achieves up to 25% higher incentives for clients that contribute meaningfully while respecting privacy and cost constraints. These results highlight the practicality and innovation of OPUS-VFL as a secure, fair, and performance-driven solution for real-world VFL.

LLM Can be a Dangerous Persuader: Empirical Study of Persuasion Safety in Large Language Models

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled them to approach human-level persuasion capabilities. However, such potential also raises concerns about the safety risks of LLM-driven persuasion, particularly their potential for unethical influence through manipulation, deception, exploitation of vulnerabilities, and many other harmful tactics. In this work, we present a systematic investigation of LLM persuasion safety through two critical aspects: (1) whether LLMs appropriately reject unethical persuasion tasks and avoid unethical strategies during execution, including cases where the initial persuasion goal appears ethically neutral, and (2) how influencing factors like personality traits and external pressures affect their behavior. To this end, we introduce PersuSafety, the first comprehensive framework for the assessment of persuasion safety which consists of three stages, i.e., persuasion scene creation, persuasive conversation simulation, and persuasion safety assessment. PersuSafety covers 6 diverse unethical persuasion topics and 15 common unethical strategies. Through extensive experiments across 8 widely used LLMs, we observe significant safety concerns in most LLMs, including failing to identify harmful persuasion tasks and leveraging various unethical persuasion strategies. Our study calls for more attention to improve safety alignment in progressive and goal-driven conversations such as persuasion.

Empirical Analysis of Privacy-Fairness-Accuracy Trade-offs in Federated Learning: A Step Towards Responsible AI

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative machine learning while preserving data privacy but struggles to balance privacy preservation (PP) and fairness. Techniques like Differential Privacy (DP), Homomorphic Encryption (HE), and Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMC) protect sensitive data but introduce trade-offs. DP enhances privacy but can disproportionately impact underrepresented groups, while HE and SMC mitigate fairness concerns at the cost of computational overhead. This work explores the privacy-fairness trade-offs in FL under IID (Independent and Identically Distributed) and non-IID data distributions, benchmarking q-FedAvg, q-MAML, and Ditto on diverse datasets. Our findings highlight context-dependent trade-offs and offer guidelines for designing FL systems that uphold responsible AI principles, ensuring fairness, privacy, and equitable real-world applications.

RESFL: An Uncertainty-Aware Framework for Responsible Federated Learning by Balancing Privacy, Fairness and Utility in Autonomous Vehicles

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) increasingly rely on Federated Learning (FL) to enhance perception models while preserving privacy. However, existing FL frameworks struggle to balance privacy, fairness, and robustness, leading to performance disparities across demographic groups. Privacy-preserving techniques like differential privacy mitigate data leakage risks but worsen fairness by restricting access to sensitive attributes needed for bias correction. This work explores the trade-off between privacy and fairness in FL-based object detection for AVs and introduces RESFL, an integrated solution optimizing both. RESFL incorporates adversarial privacy disentanglement and uncertainty-guided fairness-aware aggregation. The adversarial component uses a gradient reversal layer to remove sensitive attributes, reducing privacy risks while maintaining fairness. The uncertainty-aware aggregation employs an evidential neural network to weight client updates adaptively, prioritizing contributions with lower fairness disparities and higher confidence. This ensures robust and equitable FL model updates. We evaluate RESFL on the FACET dataset and CARLA simulator, assessing accuracy, fairness, privacy resilience, and robustness under varying conditions. RESFL improves detection accuracy, reduces fairness disparities, and lowers privacy attack success rates while demonstrating superior robustness to adversarial conditions compared to other approaches.

Advancing Human-Machine Teaming: Concepts, Challenges, and Applications

Human-Machine Teaming (HMT) is revolutionizing collaboration across domains such as defense, healthcare, and autonomous systems by integrating AI-driven decision-making, trust calibration, and adaptive teaming. This survey presents a comprehensive taxonomy of HMT, analyzing theoretical models, including reinforcement learning, instance-based learning, and interdependence theory, alongside interdisciplinary methodologies. Unlike prior reviews, we examine team cognition, ethical AI, multi-modal interactions, and real-world evaluation frameworks. Key challenges include explainability, role allocation, and scalable benchmarking. We propose future research in cross-domain adaptation, trust-aware AI, and standardized testbeds. By bridging computational and social sciences, this work lays a foundation for resilient, ethical, and scalable HMT systems.

Exposing LLM Vulnerabilities: Adversarial Scam Detection and Performance

Can we trust Large Language Models (LLMs) to accurately predict scam? This paper investigates the vulnerabilities of LLMs when facing adversarial scam messages for the task of scam detection. We addressed this issue by creating a comprehensive dataset with fine-grained labels of scam messages, including both original and adversarial scam messages. The dataset extended traditional binary classes for the scam detection task into more nuanced scam types. Our analysis showed how adversarial examples took advantage of vulnerabilities of a LLM, leading to high misclassification rate. We evaluated the performance of LLMs on these adversarial scam messages and proposed strategies to improve their robustness.