Local geometry of high-dimensional mixture models: Effective spectral theory and dynamical transitions

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Main Authors: Arous, Gerard Ben, Gheissari, Reza, Huang, Jiaoyang, Jagannath, Aukosh
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Arous, Gerard Ben
Gheissari, Reza
Huang, Jiaoyang
Jagannath, Aukosh
author_facet Arous, Gerard Ben
Gheissari, Reza
Huang, Jiaoyang
Jagannath, Aukosh
contents We study the local geometry of empirical risks in high dimensions via the spectral theory of their Hessian and information matrices. We focus on settings where the data, $(Y_\ell)_{\ell =1}^n \in \mathbb{R}^d$, are i.i.d. draws of a $k$-Gaussian mixture model, and the loss depends on the projection of the data into a fixed number of vectors, namely $\mathbf{x}^\top Y$, where $\mathbf{x}\in \mathbb{R}^{d\times C}$ are the parameters, and $C$ need not equal $k$. This setting captures a broad class of problems such as classification by one and two-layer networks and regression on multi-index models. We provide exact formulas for the limits of the empirical spectral distribution and outlier eigenvalues and eigenvectors of such matrices in the proportional asymptotics limit, where the number of samples and dimension $n,d\to\infty$ and $n/d=ϕ\in (0,\infty)$. These limits depend on the parameters $\mathbf{x}$ only through the summary statistic of the $(C+k)\times (C+k)$ Gram matrix of the parameters and class means, $\mathbf{G} = (\mathbf{x},\boldsymbolμ)^\top(\mathbf{x},\boldsymbolμ)$. It is known that under general conditions, when $\mathbf{x}$ is trained by online stochastic gradient descent, the evolution of these same summary statistics along training converges to the solution of an autonomous system of ODEs, called the effective dynamics. This enables us to connect the training dynamics to the spectral theory of these matrices generated with test data. We demonstrate our general results by analyzing the effective spectrum along the effective dynamics in the case of multi-class logistic regression. In this setting, the empirical Hessian and information matrices have substantially different spectra, each with their own static and even dynamical spectral transitions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_15655
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Local geometry of high-dimensional mixture models: Effective spectral theory and dynamical transitions
Arous, Gerard Ben
Gheissari, Reza
Huang, Jiaoyang
Jagannath, Aukosh
Statistics Theory
Probability
Machine Learning
We study the local geometry of empirical risks in high dimensions via the spectral theory of their Hessian and information matrices. We focus on settings where the data, $(Y_\ell)_{\ell =1}^n \in \mathbb{R}^d$, are i.i.d. draws of a $k$-Gaussian mixture model, and the loss depends on the projection of the data into a fixed number of vectors, namely $\mathbf{x}^\top Y$, where $\mathbf{x}\in \mathbb{R}^{d\times C}$ are the parameters, and $C$ need not equal $k$. This setting captures a broad class of problems such as classification by one and two-layer networks and regression on multi-index models. We provide exact formulas for the limits of the empirical spectral distribution and outlier eigenvalues and eigenvectors of such matrices in the proportional asymptotics limit, where the number of samples and dimension $n,d\to\infty$ and $n/d=ϕ\in (0,\infty)$. These limits depend on the parameters $\mathbf{x}$ only through the summary statistic of the $(C+k)\times (C+k)$ Gram matrix of the parameters and class means, $\mathbf{G} = (\mathbf{x},\boldsymbolμ)^\top(\mathbf{x},\boldsymbolμ)$. It is known that under general conditions, when $\mathbf{x}$ is trained by online stochastic gradient descent, the evolution of these same summary statistics along training converges to the solution of an autonomous system of ODEs, called the effective dynamics. This enables us to connect the training dynamics to the spectral theory of these matrices generated with test data. We demonstrate our general results by analyzing the effective spectrum along the effective dynamics in the case of multi-class logistic regression. In this setting, the empirical Hessian and information matrices have substantially different spectra, each with their own static and even dynamical spectral transitions.
title Local geometry of high-dimensional mixture models: Effective spectral theory and dynamical transitions
topic Statistics Theory
Probability
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.15655