Large AI Models for Coal Mining: Development, Applications, and Challenges

Large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) models are increasingly shaping safety, efficiency, and sustainability in the mining industry. This paper reviews the development, applications, and challenges of domain-specific large AI models in coal mining. These models integrate heterogeneous multimodal data—text, images, video, audio, design data, point clouds, and time series—within multi-layered architectures encompassing infrastructure, data resources, algorithms, application services, and security. Application platforms supporting knowledge services, visual analysis, and intelligent scheduling demonstrate practical improvements in operational decision-making. Despite these advances, deployment faces challenges including fragmented data, limited labeled datasets, few-/zero-shot scenarios, industry-specific adaptation, robustness and interpretability, weak causal reasoning, edge computing limitations, cost–benefit trade-offs and compatibility issues. Overcoming these barriers requires coordinated progress in data governance, model design, and industry standardization.