English

Sharp Spectral Thresholds for Multi-View Spiked Wigner Models

Probability 2026-05-20 v1 Statistics Theory Statistics Theory

Abstract

Motivated by multimodal estimation, we study a multi-view spiked Wigner model in which several noisy matrix observations contain correlated latent spikes. We derive a spectral estimator for the latent spikes by linearizing approximate message passing (AMP). Our main result is an explicit sharp transition formula for its spectrum: for L2L \geq 2 views, letting λ\lambda be the LL-dimensional vector of spike strengths and BB the L×LL\times L limiting Gram matrix of the spikes, the critical parameter is SNR(λ,B)=λmax[Diag(λ)(BB)Diag(λ)]\mathsf{SNR}(\lambda,B)=\lambda_{\max}[\mathrm{Diag}(\sqrt{\lambda}) (B \odot B) \mathrm{Diag}(\sqrt{\lambda})]. When SNR(λ,B)<1\mathsf{SNR}(\lambda,B)<1, the linearized AMP matrix has no outlier beyond the right edge of its bulk spectrum. When SNR(λ,B)>1\mathsf{SNR}(\lambda,B)>1, an informative outlier is pinned at the distinguished point 11, and the associated eigenvector has explicit, nontrivial overlaps with the latent signals. Thus SNR(λ,B)=1\mathsf{SNR}(\lambda,B)=1 gives the exact spectral weak-recovery threshold for the linearized AMP method. To establish our results, we analyze the correlated Gaussian noise matrix through a matrix Dyson equation and combine this deterministic description with finite-rank perturbation arguments adapted to the multi-view spike structure. We also show that, for a broad class of spike priors, the spectral threshold SNR(λ,B)=1\mathsf{SNR}(\lambda,B)=1 coincides with the information-theoretic threshold for weak recovery, ruling out a statistical-computational gap for this class of priors.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.19894,
  title  = {Sharp Spectral Thresholds for Multi-View Spiked Wigner Models},
  author = {Xiaodong Yang and Subhabrata Sen and Yue M. Lu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.19894},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

67 pages, 2 figures