Spontaneous symmetry breaking and Goldstone modes for deep information propagation
In physical systems, whenever a continuous symmetry is spontaneously broken, the system possesses excitations called Goldstone modes, which allow coherent information propagation over long distances and times. In this work, we study deep neural networks whose internal layers are equivariant under a continuous symmetry and may therefore support analogous Goldstone-like degrees of freedom. We demonstrate, both analytically and empirically, that these degrees of freedom enable coherent signal propagation across depth and recurrent iterations, providing a mechanism for stable information flow without relying on architectural stabilizers such as residual connections or normalization. In feedfo...
| Authors | Nabil Iqbal, T. Anderson Keller, Yue Song et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 14 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 14 May 2026 |
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