Random Quadratic Form on a Sphere: Synchronization by Common Noise

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Hauptverfasser: Engel, Maximilian, Shalova, Anna
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Engel, Maximilian
Shalova, Anna
author_facet Engel, Maximilian
Shalova, Anna
contents We introduce the Random Quadratic Form (RQF): a stochastic differential equation which formally corresponds to the gradient flow of a random quadratic functional on a sphere. While the one-point dynamics of the system is a Brownian motion and thus has no preferred direction, the two-point motion exhibits nontrivial synchronizing behaviour. In this work we study synchronization of the RQF, namely we give both distributional and path-wise characterizations of the solutions by studying invariant measures and random attractors of the system. The RQF model is motivated by the study of the role of linear layers in transformers and illustrates the synchronization by common noise phenomena arising in the simplified models of transformers. In particular, we provide an alternative (independent of self-attention) explanation of the clustering behaviour in deep transformers and show that tokens cluster even in the absence of the self-attention mechanism.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_06187
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Random Quadratic Form on a Sphere: Synchronization by Common Noise
Engel, Maximilian
Shalova, Anna
Probability
Machine Learning
Dynamical Systems
We introduce the Random Quadratic Form (RQF): a stochastic differential equation which formally corresponds to the gradient flow of a random quadratic functional on a sphere. While the one-point dynamics of the system is a Brownian motion and thus has no preferred direction, the two-point motion exhibits nontrivial synchronizing behaviour. In this work we study synchronization of the RQF, namely we give both distributional and path-wise characterizations of the solutions by studying invariant measures and random attractors of the system. The RQF model is motivated by the study of the role of linear layers in transformers and illustrates the synchronization by common noise phenomena arising in the simplified models of transformers. In particular, we provide an alternative (independent of self-attention) explanation of the clustering behaviour in deep transformers and show that tokens cluster even in the absence of the self-attention mechanism.
title Random Quadratic Form on a Sphere: Synchronization by Common Noise
topic Probability
Machine Learning
Dynamical Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.06187