Independent Component Analysis (ICA) is a foundational tool for unsupervised representation learning, yet its high-dimensional theory remains largely limited to single-component recovery. We develop an asymptotically exact mean-field theory for multi-component online ICA, capturing the coupling induced by simultaneous learning and orthogonalization. In the high-dimensional limit, the joint empirical distribution of learned estimates and ground-truth components converges to a deterministic process, yielding a closed ODE system for the overlap matrix between learned directions and true components. This characterization reveals a genuinely multi-component, initialization-driven phase structure: a decoupled regime, where estimates align with distinct components and evolve nearly independently, and a competition regime, where overlapping initializations induce orthogonality-driven conflicts, slow reorientation, and delayed convergence. Our steady-state analysis gives explicit learnability boundaries and competition conditions linking step size, data moments, and initialization. These conditions show that larger higher-order moments and competition shrink the stable learning-rate window, increase convergence times, and predict a staircase phenomenon in which the number of recoverable components changes discretely with the learning rate. Experiments on synthetic data and hyperspectral remote sensing data validate the predicted trajectories and phase behavior.
We present the mathematical foundations of linear independent component analysis (ICA) models based on standard literature in a self-contained note. It is aimed at readers with a background in measure-theoretic probability theory. We first develop the theory of the characteristic functions of probability measures on Rd, including their analyticity and the way in which they determine and characterise the distributions. We then focus on several identifiability results of ICA models with successively strengthened assumptions on the sources: from merely non-constant, to non-Gaussian, to Gaussian-free independent sources. Under the strictest assumptions, we show that the independent sources are identifiable up to translation, permutation, scales and signs, and this even in the presence of additive Gaussian noise. Furthermore, we present the online equivariant gradient descent ICA algorithm for recovering the independent sources from data, in the standard complete noiseless non-Gaussian ICA setting.
Recent work has identified incremental learning in shallow networks trained on single-index and multi-index models. However, existing analyses often rely on simplifying settings, such as small initialization, correlation loss, or layer-wise training. These choices reduce neuron interactions and leave some feature learning dynamics under standard initialization unexplored. We study training dynamics for polynomial-width two-layer networks learning orthogonal multi-index targets under standard initialization using polynomially many samples. We first prove that incremental learning still occurs: the loss decreases sequentially according to the Hermite expansion of the target, with lower-order components learned before higher-order components recover the individual target directions. In this standard initialization regime, training also shows a competitive reallocation of parameter mass: after the total mass fits the target mean and stabilizes, mass shifts into the target subspace and then concentrates on aligned neurons. Our theoretical analysis uses slightly modified gradient flow, while vanilla gradient descent empirically exhibits the same qualitative dynamics. Technically, we introduce a symmetry-based finite-width approximation via symmetrized networks, rather than comparing directly with an infinite-width limit. This yields better control of approximation errors and may be of independent interest.
We propose a simple mechanism by which scaling laws emerge from feature learning in multi-layer networks. We study a high-dimensional hierarchical target that is a globally high-degree function, but that can be represented by a combination of latent compositional features whose weights decrease as a power law. We show that a layer-wise spectral algorithm adapted to this compositional structure achieves improved scaling relative to shallow, non-adaptive methods, and recovers the latent directions sequentially: strong features become detectable at small sample sizes, while weaker features require more data. We prove sharp feature-wise recovery thresholds and show that aggregating these transitions yields an explicit power-law decay of the prediction error. Technically, the analysis relies on random matrix methods and a resolvent-based perturbation argument, which gives matching upper and lower bounds for individual eigenvector recovery beyond what standard gap-based perturbation bounds provide. Numerical experiments confirm the predicted sequential recovery, finite-size smoothing of the thresholds, and separation from non-hierarchical kernel baselines. Together, these results show how smooth scaling laws can emerge from a cascade of sharp feature-learning transitions.
Arie Wortsman-Zurich, Hugo Tabanelli, Yatin Dandi +2