We introduce several new kinds of inferior and superior limits and corresponding kinds of semicontinuity of a set-valued map. Together with the known concepts of semicontinuity, they can be used to have a clearer insight of local behaviors of maps. Then we investigate all major semicontinuity properties of solution maps to a general quasivariational inclusion. Consequences are derived for sever...

Abstract. We use a new variational method—based on the theory of anti-selfdual Lagrangians developed in [2] and [3]—to establish the existence of solutions of convex Hamiltonian systems that connect two given Lagrangian submanifolds in R . We also consider the case where the Hamiltonian is only semi-convex. A variational principle is also used to establish existence for the corresponding Cauchy...

Tutorial topics • A bit of history • Examples of variational methods • A brief intro to graphical models • Variational mean field theory – Accuracy of variational mean field – Structured mean field theory • Variational methods in Bayesian estimation • Convex duality and variational factorization methods – Example: variational inference and the QMR-DT Variational methods • Classical setting: " f...

‎in this paper we study the existence of nontrivial‎ solutions for a variational inequality on the half-line‎. ‎our‎ ‎approach is based on the non-smooth critical point theory‎ ‎for szulkin-type functionals.

Bayesian learning has been widely used and proved to be effective in many data modeling problems. However, computations involved in it require huge costs and generally cannot be performed exactly. The variational Bayesian approach, proposed as an approximation of Bayesian learning, has provided computational tractability and good generalization performance in many applications. The properties a...

We develop a variational scheme in a field theoretic approach to a stochastic process. While various stochastic processes can be expressed by master equations, in general it is difficult to solve the master equations exactly, and it is also hard to solve the master equations numerically because of the curse of dimensionality. The field theoretic approach has been used in order to study such com...

It has been known since the early 1970s that the Hessian matrices in quasi– Newton methods can be updated by variational means, in several different ways. The usual formulation of these variational problems uses a coordinate system, and the symmetry of the Hessian matrices are enforced as explicit constraints. As a result, the variational problems seem complicated. In this paper, we give a very...

In this paper, we consider a new class of quasi variational inequalities involving three operators, which is called the extended general quasi variational inequality. It is shown that the extended general quasi variational inequalities are equivalent to the fixed problems. This equivalence is used to suggest and analyze some iterative methods for solving the extended general quasi variational i...

We propose a black-box variational inference method to approximate intractable distributions with an increasingly rich approximating class. Our method, variational boosting, iteratively refines an existing variational approximation by solving a sequence of optimization problems, allowing a trade-off between computation time and accuracy. We expand the variational approximating class by incorpor...