{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/statistical-mechanics-of-the-maximum-average","title":"Statistical mechanics of the maximum-average submatrix problem","arxiv_id":"2303.05237","date":"2023-03-09","proceeding":null,"authors":["Vittorio Erba","Florent Krzakala","Rodrigo Pérez","Lenka Zdeborová"],"abstract":"We study the maximum-average submatrix problem, in which given an $N \\times N$ matrix $J$ one needs to find the $k \\times k$ submatrix with the largest average of entries. We study the problem for random matrices $J$ whose entries are i.i.d. random variables by mapping it to a variant of the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick spin-glass model at fixed magnetization. We characterize analytically the phase diagram of the model as a function of the submatrix average and the size of the submatrix $k$ in the limit $N\\to\\infty$. We consider submatrices of size $k = m N$ with $0 < m < 1$. We find a rich phase diagram, including dynamical, static one-step replica symmetry breaking and full-step replica symmetry breaking. In the limit of $m \\to 0$, we find a simpler phase diagram featuring a frozen 1-RSB phase, where the Gibbs measure is composed of exponentially many pure states each with zero entropy. We discover an interesting phenomenon, reminiscent of the phenomenology of the binary perceptron: there exist efficient algorithms that provably work in the frozen 1-RSB phase.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.05237v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.05237v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"statistical-mechanics-of-the-maximum-average","repo_url":"https://github.com/SPOC-group/Maximum-Average-Submatrix","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}