Clay weekly context brief for the Quantitative Biology category (ISO week 2026-W36).

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. Attention as Conditioning: What Classical Learning Theory Predicts About Linear Transformers
   Source: q-bio.NC (Neurons and Cognition)
   Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08289
   Attention is widely understood as an associative memory, but that description alone does not predict how the memory will behave.
2. Planning difficulty and temporal constraints differently shape the level of detail and ordering of visual exploration
   Source: q-bio.NC (Neurons and Cognition)
   Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.19881
   Planning entails identifying sequences of actions to reach a goal, but how much of a future plan is constructed before movement and how visual exploration supports this process remain poorly understood.
3. Relational Knowledge Distillation Brings DNN Representations Close Enough to Humans to Be Aligned Without Supervision
   Source: q-bio.NC (Neurons and Cognition)
   Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.27877
   Linking the internal representations of deep neural networks (DNNs) to human mental representations is important for using DNNs as computational models of human vision.
4. Leveraging a Foundation Model for the EEG-Based Diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease
   Source: q-bio.NC (Neurons and Cognition)
   Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.27719
   Biological heterogeneity in Alzheimer's Disease (AD) poses a critical diagnostic challenge, particularly for traditional linear methods that fail to capture non-linear neural dynamics.
5. Adaptive self-organized criticality in deep neural networks
   Source: q-bio.NC (Neurons and Cognition)
   Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.28431
   Deep neural networks are high-dimensional dynamical systems whose function depends on the stable propagation of activity and perturbations across many layers.
6. Multiscale Community-Based Fingerprinting of Signed Functional Networks
   Source: q-bio.NC (Neurons and Cognition)
   Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.27483
   Objective: Recent studies demonstrate that functional connectomes contain subject-specific signatures, or \textit{fingerprints}, that can identify individuals across repeated sessions and tasks.

Sources in this brief: q-bio.NC (Neurons and Cognition).
Selected 6 of 6 available items for this weekly brief.