Mechanism confirmed, baseline not beaten
2026
Spectral subspace initialization for nonlinear teachers
Use a bounded function of the response to form a supervised, label-weighted covariance of the input and initialize the first neural layer from its leading outlier eigenspace. For vector-valued responses, use a matrix-valued response preprocessing map so several label statistics are combined in one lifted spectral estimator.
Paper: Spectral phase transitions in Gaussian multi-index models
arXiv:2608.12183