Consider a collection of particles whose state evolution is described through a system of interacting diffusions in which each particle is driven by an independent individual source of noise and also by a small amount of noise that is common to all particles. The interaction between the particles is due to the common noise and also through the drift and diffusion coefficients that depend on the state empirical measure. We study large deviation behavior of the empirical measure process which is governed by two types of scaling, one corresponding to mean field asymptotics and the other to the Freidlin–Wentzell small noise asymptotics. The rate functions under the various parameter regimes can be interpreted as the value functions of certain mean field stochastic control problems in which there are two types of controls; one of the controls is random and nonanticipative and arises from the aggregated contributions of the individual Brownian noises, whereas the second control is nonrandom and corresponds to the small common Brownian noise that impacts all particles. This is based on joint work with Conroy.

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