A Training-Time Diagnostic for Generalization via the Log-Alignment Ratio

arXiv:2605.28975v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the log-alignment ratio (LAR), a measure of parameter-activation alignment, introduced in parameterization theory. We reformulate it as the overlap between a weight spectrum $p$ of the normalized squared singular values of a matrix and an activation spectrum $q$ of the normalized squared projections of inputs onto its singular directions. We show that unembedding LAR tracks the transition between memorization and generalization in two dif