v1.7.2

Changed

• MetaTAF TafR weighting is now objective-wise pairwise ranking agreement (openbo's 2026-08 TAF-R rework, formulation by Yi-Chi Liao): every observation pair is scored once per objective with ranking labels r_ijm ∈ {+1, −1, 0} (ties detected at 1e-12 tolerance), and a source's distance is its label mismatch count over the fixed denominator M·C(n,2); a source asserting no strict order anywhere (flat surrogate) is zero-weighted outright. The former Pareto-dominance agreement discarded mutually non-dominated pairs — the common case near a Pareto front — and so starved the similarity estimate exactly where HITL studies operate; it stays selectable as the new TafRPareto inspector option (init token taf_r_pareto) for ablations.
• The MetaTAF backend now refuses openbo installs predating that rework at startup, printing the exact upgrade command (pip install --force-reinstall --no-deps ...; openbo kept version 0.1.0, so a plain --upgrade is a no-op). On a stale install the unchanged mode token taf_r would silently compute the old dominance similarity — variant drift across participants of one study. Documented in README 9 (troubleshooting), the student guide, and requirements.txt.

Documentation

• Student guide: the new TAF-R formulation in the settings table and the paper-notation method summary, the TafRPareto ablation, the openbo upgrade path, and a note on tie semantics — with quantized ratings (e.g. Likert scales) target ties are common and shrink all sources' absolute weights by roughly the tie fraction (ordering between sources is preserved; mind this when tightening Meta Rho).

Tests

• 2 new MetaTAF runtime tests (taf_r_pareto accepted and forwarded verbatim to MOTAFConfig; stale openbo rejected with the upgrade hint, distinct from the missing-package error; 198 total). On the openbo side the rework ships with regression tests for the reviewer's worked example (d_s = 1/2), tie semantics, the trade-off-curve edge case (dominance variant returns the null similarity result, ranking variant separates a copy from an inverted source), and a brute-force EHVI equivalence check (exp(qLogEHVI) vs HV(front ∪ {μ(x)}) − HV(front), ~2e-7 relative error at M=2, ~7e-5 at M=3).