  Kaluza-Klein compactifications of higher dimensional Yang-Mills theories
contain a number of four dimensional scalars corresponding to the internal
components of the gauge field. While at tree-level the scalar zero modes are
massless, it is well known that quantum corrections make them massive. We
compute these radiative corrections at 1-loop in an effective field theory
framework, using the background field method and proper Schwinger-time
regularization. In order to clarify the proper treatment of the sum over
KK--modes in the effective field theory approach, we consider the same problem
in two different UV completions of Yang-Mills: string theory and lattice field
theory. In both cases, when the compactification radius $R$ is much bigger than
the scale of the UV completion ($R \gg \sqrt{\alpha'},a$), we recover a mass
renormalization that is independent of the UV scale and agrees with the one
derived in the effective field theory approach. These results support the idea
that the value of the mass corrections is, in this regime, universal for any UV
completion that respects locality and gauge invariance. The string analysis
suggests that this property holds also at higher loops. The lattice analysis
suggests that the mass of the adjoint scalars appearing in $\mathcal N=2,4$
Super Yang-Mills is highly suppressed due to an interplay between the
higher-dimensional gauge invariance and the degeneracy of bosonic and fermionic
degrees of freedom.
