From Pairwise Attention to Many-Body Physics: The Hidden Phase Shift in Transformers
Derrick Hodge
Independent Researcher
derrick@hodgedomain.com
We present evidence for a universal phase transition in transformer attention mechanisms that fundamentally alters their computational strategy based on input sequence length. Using Random Matrix Theory (RMT) baselines, spectral analysis, and information-theoretic measures, we demonstrate that transformers operate in two distinct regimes: a Local Interaction Regime for short sequences characterized by distributed pairwise processing, and a Collective Correlation Regime beyond a critical length