DeepTaxon: An Interpretable Retrieval-Augmented Multimodal Framework for Unified Species Identification and Discovery

Identifying species in biology among tens of thousands of visually similar taxa while discovering unknown species in open-world environments remains a fundamental challenge in biodiversity research. Current methods treat identification and discovery as separate problems, with classification models assuming closed sets and discovery relying on threshold-based rejection. Here we present DeepTaxon, a retrieval-augmented multimodal framework that unifies species identification and discovery through interpretable reasoning over retrieved visual evidence. Given a query image, DeepTaxon retrieves the top-$k$ candidate species with $n$ exemplar images each from a retrieval index and performs chain-of-thought comparative reasoning. Critically, we redefine discovery as an explicit, retrieval-based decision problem rather than an implicit parametric memory problem. A sample is novel if and only if the retrieval index lacks sufficient evidence for identification, so each retrieval naturally yields a classification or discovery label without manual annotation, thereby providing automatic supervision for both tasks. We train the framework via supervised fine-tuning on synthetic retrieval-augmented data, followed by reinforcement learning on hard samples, converting high-recall retrieval into high-precision decisions that scale to massive taxonomic vocabularies. Extensive experiments on a large-scale in-distribution benchmark and six out-of-distribution datasets demonstrate consistent improvements in both identification and discovery. Ablation studies further reveal effective test-time scaling with candidate count $k$ and exemplar count $n$, strong zero-shot transfer to unseen domains, and consistent performance across retrieval encoders, establishing an interpretable solution for biodiversity research.

Differential Privacy Image Generation with Reconstruction Loss and Noise Injection Using an Error Feedback SGD

Traditional data masking techniques such as anonymization cannot achieve the expected privacy protection while ensuring data utility for privacy-preserving machine learning. Synthetic data plays an increasingly important role as it generates a large number of training samples and prevents information leakage in real data. The existing methods suffer from the repeating trade-off processes between privacy and utility. We propose a novel framework for differential privacy generation, which employs an Error Feedback Stochastic Gradient Descent(EFSGD) method and introduces a reconstruction loss and noise injection mechanism into the training process. We generate images with higher quality and usability under the same privacy budget as the related work. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of our proposed framework for both grayscale and RGB images. We achieve state-of-the-art results over almost all metrics on three benchmarks: MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and CelebA.

SARCLIP: A Vision Language Foundation Model for Semantic Understanding and Target Recognition in SAR Imagery

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) has emerged as a crucial imaging modality due to its all-weather capabilities. While recent advancements in self-supervised learning and Masked Image Modeling (MIM) have paved the way for SAR foundation models, these approaches primarily focus on low-level visual features, often overlooking multimodal alignment and zero-shot target recognition within SAR imagery. To address this limitation, we construct SARCLIP-1M, a large-scale vision language dataset comprising over one million text-image pairs aggregated from existing datasets. We further introduce SARCLIP, the first vision language foundation model tailored for the SAR domain. Our SARCLIP model is trained using a contrastive vision language learning approach by domain transferring strategy, enabling it to bridge the gap between SAR imagery and textual descriptions. Extensive experiments on image-text retrieval and zero-shot classification tasks demonstrate the superior performance of SARCLIP in feature extraction and interpretation, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art foundation models and advancing the semantic understanding of SAR imagery. The code and datasets will be released soon.