Abstract:Neural ODEs are increasingly used as continuous-time models for scientific and sensor data, but unconstrained neural ODEs can drift and violate domain invariants (e.g., conservation laws), yielding physically implausible solutions. In turn, this can compound error in long-horizon prediction and surrogate simulation. Existing solutions typically aim to enforce invariance by soft penalties or other forms of regularization, which can reduce overall error but do not guarantee that trajectories will not leave the constraint manifold. We introduce the invariant compiler, a framework that enforces invariants by construction: it treats invariants as first-class types and uses an LLM-driven compilation workflow to translate a generic neural ODE specification into a structure-preserving architecture whose trajectories remain on the admissible manifold in continuous time (and up to numerical integration error in practice). This compiler view cleanly separates what must be preserved (scientific structure) from what is learned from data (dynamics within that structure). It provides a systematic design pattern for invariant-respecting neural surrogates across scientific domains.
Abstract:Epidemiological models increasingly rely on self-reported behavioral data such as vaccination status, mask usage, and social distancing adherence to forecast disease transmission and assess the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). While such data provide valuable real-time insights, they are often subject to strategic misreporting, driven by individual incentives to avoid penalties, access benefits, or express distrust in public health authorities. To account for such human behavior, in this paper, we introduce a game-theoretic framework that models the interaction between the population and a public health authority as a signaling game. Individuals (senders) choose how to report their behaviors, while the public health authority (receiver) updates their epidemiological model(s) based on potentially distorted signals. Focusing on deception around masking and vaccination, we characterize analytically game equilibrium outcomes and evaluate the degree to which deception can be tolerated while maintaining epidemic control through policy interventions. Our results show that separating equilibria-with minimal deception-drive infections to near zero over time. Remarkably, even under pervasive dishonesty in pooling equilibria, well-designed sender and receiver strategies can still maintain effective epidemic control. This work advances the understanding of adversarial data in epidemiology and offers tools for designing more robust public health models in the presence of strategic user behavior.
Abstract:Epidemiological forecasting from surveillance data is a hard problem and hybridizing mechanistic compartmental models with neural models is a natural direction. The mechanistic structure helps keep trajectories epidemiologically plausible, while neural components can capture non-stationary, data-adaptive effects. In practice, however, many seemingly straightforward couplings fail under partial observability and continually shifting transmission dynamics driven by behavior, waning immunity, seasonality, and interventions. We catalog these failure modes and show that robust performance requires making non-stationarity explicit: we extract multi-scale structure from the observed infection series and use it as an interpretable control signal for a controlled neural ODE coupled to an epidemiological model. Concretely, we decompose infections into trend, seasonal, and residual components and use these signals to drive continuous-time latent dynamics while jointly forecasting and inferring time-varying transmission, recovery, and immunity-loss rates. Across seasonal and non-seasonal settings, including early outbreaks and multi-wave regimes, our approach reduces long-horizon RMSE by 15-35%, improves peak timing error by 1-3 weeks, and lowers peak magnitude bias by up to 30% relative to strong time-series, neural ODE, and hybrid baselines, without relying on auxiliary covariates.
Abstract:Epidemic modeling is essential for public health planning, yet traditional approaches rely on fixed model classes that require manual redesign as pathogens, policies, and scenario assumptions evolve. We introduce EPIAGENT, an agentic framework that automatically synthesizes, calibrates, verifies, and refines epidemiological simulators by modeling disease progression as an iterative program synthesis problem. A central design choice is an explicit epidemiological flow graph intermediate representation that links scenario specifications to model structure and enables strong, modular correctness checks before code is generated. Verified flow graphs are then compiled into mechanistic models supporting interpretable parameter learning under physical and epidemiological constraints. Evaluation on epidemiological scenario case studies demonstrates that EPIAGENT captures complex growth dynamics and produces epidemiologically consistent counterfactual projections across varying vaccination and immune escape assumptions. Our results show that the agentic feedback loop prevents degeneration and significantly accelerates convergence toward valid models by mimicking professional expert workflows.
Abstract:Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly touted as powerful tools for automating scientific information extraction. However, existing methods and tools often struggle with the realities of scientific literature: long-context documents, multi-modal content, and reconciling varied and inconsistent fine-grained information across multiple publications into standardized formats. These challenges are further compounded when the desired data schema or extraction ontology changes rapidly, making it difficult to re-architect or fine-tune existing systems. We present SciEx, a modular and composable framework that decouples key components including PDF parsing, multi-modal retrieval, extraction, and aggregation. This design streamlines on-demand data extraction while enabling extensibility and flexible integration of new models, prompting strategies, and reasoning mechanisms. We evaluate SciEx on datasets spanning three scientific topics for its ability to extract fine-grained information accurately and consistently. Our findings provide practical insights into both the strengths and limitations of current LLM-based pipelines.