Singular vectors of sparse random rectangular matrices: Transition between delocalized and semilocalized phases

Abstract

Consider the bipartite Erdős--Rényi graph $\mathbb{G}(n,m,d/\sqrt{mn})$ at the critical sparsity $d = b\log(N)$ for some $b > 0$ with $N = n + m$, and constant aspect ratio $γ= n/m \geq 1$. We show that the spectrum of its centered and rescaled bi-adjacency matrix, whose limiting law is the Marčenko--Pastur (MP) distribution, is split into two phases: in the bulk, singular vectors are completely delocalized, while near the edges, singular vectors are semilocalized, with their mass concentrating on small disjoint balls, centered at vertices with extreme degrees. As $b$ decreases, we identify sharp thresholds for the emergence of outlier singular values. For explicit $b_{\rm R}^{\star}$ and $b_{\rm L}^{\star}$ as functions of $γ$, we prove that when $b > b_{\rm R}^{\star}$, there is no outlier outside the bulk; when $b_{\rm L}^{\star}< b < b_{\rm R}^{\star}$, only right outliers emerge; and when $b < b_{\rm L}^{\star}$, outliers are present on both sides, all with high probability. This removes an extra technical condition from our previous work arxiv:2508.01456, providing a complete characterization of the parameter space. In sparser regimes, in terms of left outliers, we provide some nontrivial generating mechanisms, demonstrating that local graph structure plays a key role in understanding extreme singular values. Our proofs rely on two technical inputs: (1) an entrywise local law in the MP bulk, where the deterministic equivalent of the resolvent depends on both variance profiles and normalized vertex degrees, different from the Gaussian setting; (2) spectral radius upper bounds for nonbacktracking matrices constructed from regularized random graphs, recently developed in arXiv: 2609.26615. Our results reveal fruitful phenomena for sparse random rectangular matrices at criticality, which are beyond the universality class of their Gaussian counterparts.