Where Pretraining writes and Alignment reads: the asymmetry of Transformer weight space

Cross-entropy pretraining and preference alignment update the same transformer weights, but leave geometrically distinct traces. We characterise this asymmetry with a relative-subspace-fraction probe that tracks how weight deltas align with residual-stream activation subspaces and with the prediction subspace defined by the unembedding. Alignment deltas concentrate in the read pathway (WQ, WK), along principal directions of attention-input activations, while remaining near-isotropic in the write pathway (WO, W2) relative to the prediction subspace. We explain this pattern through anisotropic gradient accumulation: updates to a matrix W are sums of outer products δt at^top, and inherit directional structure from whichever side has concentrated covariance. For read-pathway matrices, this side is the input activation at, whose covariance is spiked in trained transformers and therefore produces objective-agnostic concentration. For write-pathway matrices, the relevant side is the upstream gradient δt, whose anisotropy depends on the loss. Cross-entropy supplies the canonical sharp per-sample signal, inducing write-pathway prediction geometry during pretraining; alignment objectives typically add little further write-side concentration. We support this explanation with a within-checkpoint trajectory, a graded contrastive-objective control, and a closed-form rank-1 intervention with matched direction controls, providing causal evidence for the proposed weight-space geometry.