The McLerran-Venugopalan (MV) model is a Gaussian effective theory of color charge fluctuations at small-$x$ in the limit of large valence charge density, {it i}.{it e}., a large nucleus made of uncorrelated color charges. In this work, we explore the effects of the first non-trivial (even C-parity) non-Gaussian correction on the color charge density to the MV model (quartic term) in SU(2) and SU(3) color group in the non-perturbative regime. We compare our (numerical) non-perturbative results to (analytical) perturbative ones in the limit of small or large non-Gaussian fluctuations. The couplings in the non-Gaussian action, $barmu$ for the quadratic and $kappa_4$ for the quartic term, need to be renormalized in order to match the two-point function in the Gaussian theory. We investigate three different choices for the renormalization of these couplings: i) $kappa_{4}$ is proportional to a power of $barmu$; ii) $kappa_4$ is kept constant and iii) $barmu$ is kept constant. We find that the first two choices lead to a scenario where the small-$x$ action evolves towards a theory dominated by large non-Gaussian fluctuations, regardless of the system size, while the last one allows for controlling the deviations from the MV model.
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