Clay weekly context brief for the Quantitative Biology category (ISO week 2026-W30).

Clay tracks publications from the Quantitative Biology feed list. Below are recent items from this category, each with its source and a short description of what the publication covers when one is available in the source feed.

Recent publications:
1. Structural Compression for Phylogenetic Inference under Alignment Instability and Indel-Rich Evolution
   Source: q-bio.QM (Quantitative Methods)
   Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.15308
   Phylogenetic inference traditionally relies on aligned characters under substitution models, but this framework becomes less reliable when alignments are unstable or when evolution is dominated by insertions, deletions, repeats, and other structural changes.
2. The RG-Flow Transformer: Encoding Scale-Free Dynamics in Scarce EEG
   Source: q-bio.NC (Neurons and Cognition)
   Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11950
   Brain field potentials are scale-free: their power spectra follow a $1/f^{\beta}$ law whose aperiodic exponent $\beta$ tracks cortical state, and sleep depth in particular is a shift in $\beta$.
3. Toward a mechanistic understanding of inference in visual cortex and diffusion models
   Source: q-bio.NC (Neurons and Cognition)
   Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.15693
   We describe a model of perceptual inference in primary visual cortex (V1) equivalent to a minimal diffusion model whose function can be readily understood from its parameters.

Sources in this brief: q-bio.NC (Neurons and Cognition); q-bio.QM (Quantitative Methods).
Selected 3 of 3 available items for this weekly brief.