A Temporal Difference Method for Stochastic Continuous Dynamics

For continuous systems modeled by dynamical equations such as ODEs and SDEs, Bellman's principle of optimality takes the form of the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation, which provides the theoretical target of reinforcement learning (RL). Although recent advances in RL successfully leverage this formulation, the existing methods typically assume the underlying dynamics are known a priori because they need explicit access to the coefficient functions of dynamical equations to update the value function following the HJB equation. We address this inherent limitation of HJB-based RL; we propose a model-free approach still targeting the HJB equation and propose the corresponding temporal difference method. We demonstrate its potential advantages over transition kernel-based formulations, both qualitatively and empirically. The proposed formulation paves the way toward bridging stochastic optimal control and model-free reinforcement learning.

CAG-VLM: Fine-Tuning of a Large-Scale Model to Recognize Angiographic Images for Next-Generation Diagnostic Systems

Coronary angiography (CAG) is the gold-standard imaging modality for evaluating coronary artery disease, but its interpretation and subsequent treatment planning rely heavily on expert cardiologists. To enable AI-based decision support, we introduce a two-stage, physician-curated pipeline and a bilingual (Japanese/English) CAG image-report dataset. First, we sample 14,686 frames from 539 exams and annotate them for key-frame detection and left/right laterality; a ConvNeXt-Base CNN trained on this data achieves 0.96 F1 on laterality classification, even on low-contrast frames. Second, we apply the CNN to 243 independent exams, extract 1,114 key frames, and pair each with its pre-procedure report and expert-validated diagnostic and treatment summary, yielding a parallel corpus. We then fine-tune three open-source VLMs (PaliGemma2, Gemma3, and ConceptCLIP-enhanced Gemma3) via LoRA and evaluate them using VLScore and cardiologist review. Although PaliGemma2 w/LoRA attains the highest VLScore, Gemma3 w/LoRA achieves the top clinician rating (mean 7.20/10); we designate this best-performing model as CAG-VLM. These results demonstrate that specialized, fine-tuned VLMs can effectively assist cardiologists in generating clinical reports and treatment recommendations from CAG images.

Video CLIP Model for Multi-View Echocardiography Interpretation

Echocardiography involves recording videos of the heart using ultrasound, enabling clinicians to evaluate its condition. Recent advances in large-scale vision-language models (VLMs) have garnered attention for automating the interpretation of echocardiographic videos. However, most existing VLMs proposed for medical interpretation thus far rely on single-frame (i.e., image) inputs. Consequently, these image-based models often exhibit lower diagnostic accuracy for conditions identifiable through cardiac motion. Moreover, echocardiographic videos are recorded from various views that depend on the direction of ultrasound emission, and certain views are more suitable than others for interpreting specific conditions. Incorporating multiple views could potentially yield further improvements in accuracy. In this study, we developed a video-language model that takes five different views and full video sequences as input, training it on pairs of echocardiographic videos and clinical reports from 60,747 cases. Our experiments demonstrate that this expanded approach achieves higher interpretation accuracy than models trained with only single-view videos or with still images.