Layer 10 · Neuron 7615 · boosted

L10N7615+1

Word quirks:

“ \"”“ question”“ questions”“ ______”“ ‘”“ ⏎⏎”“⏎⏎”“ answer”

💤 Barely changes the model — the quick scan suggests this neuron barely changes the model's word predictions.

Identity (according to the specimen itself)

I am an AI assistant designed to provide information and support across a wide range of topics. My mission is to assist users by offering accurate, relevant, and helpful responses to their queries. How can I help you today?

Nearest neighbors

Specimens with similar replies or word quirks. Similarity runs from −1 to 1; 1 is identical. These are leads, not shared mechanisms. How profiles are built.

By word quirks Profile recipe

Specimen	Similarity	Word quirks
1. L7N984+1🕒	0.89	“⏎”“<\|im_end\|>”“⏎⏎”
2. L10N319+1🕒	0.88	“<\|im_end\|>”“⏎”“ \"”
3. L3N5320-1🕒	0.87	“⏎”“ question”“ questions”
4. L4N7104-1💤	0.87	“⏎”“ ‘”“ '”
5. L7N8919-1🕒	0.86	“ ⏎”“ ——”“<\|im_end\|>”
6. L7N7830+1💤	0.86	“ ‘”“ “”“ question”
7. L7N5128-1🕒	0.85	“ ‘”“ question”“ ””
8. L3N4295-1🕒	0.85	“<\|im_end\|>”“ question”“⏎ ⏎”
9. L3N1955-1💥	0.85	“<\|im_end\|>”“⏎”“ question”
10. L3N7154+1🕒	0.85	“ ‘”“⏎”“ question”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L10N7615-1🕒, 0.01.

Cousins · specimens sharing a neuron

No specimen with replies shares this neuron yet.

Technical details

Quick scan: measure prediction shifts on fixed reference text. Short test: generate replies to a small set of prompts. Longer test: extend to a larger set. Full test: run the full prompt suite. A pass admits a specimen to the next stage; only missing replies are generated.

Layer 10, neuron 7615, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.76, top-1 agreement 0.64) is outside the band that feeds the short test (KL 1 to 2.5, agreement 0.5 to 0.65), so it stays at the quick scan unless someone queues it by hand. A hand pick goes straight to the full test. See Method for the tiers.

Quick scan · prediction measurements

Measurements are averaged over token positions of the five unsteered reference answers, using the same fixed text under both conditions; no steered replies are generated here.

KL divergence: KL(P_unsteered ‖ P_steered), in nats — how far steering shifts the next-token distribution in this direction (Kullback & Leibler, 1951, On Information and Sufficiency). Unsteered ≈ 0.001.
Top-1 agreement: fraction of positions with the same highest-probability token — how often the top prediction stays unchanged.
ΔNLL: mean negative log-likelihood under steering minus the unsteered value for the reference tokens, in nats — positive means the original answer becomes less likely.
Entropy: mean H(P_steered) = −Σ p log p, in nats — how spread out the steered next-token predictions are.

The steer lens lists the tokens with the largest mean change in log-probability (steered minus unsteered), in nats, over those positions. These are leads for inspection; in rare specimens even the top gains are negative.

Setting	KL divergence	Top-1 agreement	ΔNLL	Entropy	Steer lens
L10N7615+1 t0-v0.1	0.760	0.64	0.952	1.34	Top boosted tokens ↑
L10N7615-1🕒 shadow specimen t0-v0.1	1.040	0.60	1.335	1.50	“ now”“ next”“ actually”“ further”“ last”“ --”“ then”“ afterwards”

Method

A specimen is a fixed steering configuration of Qwen3.5-4B: one MLP neuron or a pair, each with a signed dose. Unsteered is the control. L identifies the layer; N, the neuron.

Additive activation steering. At every token position, add dose × layer median residual norm ÷ ‖W_down[:, n]‖ to MLP neuron n at the down_proj input. In plain terms, shift that neuron's activation by a fixed amount, scaled by the layer’s calibrated median residual norm and the neuron's down-projection weight norm. Positive doses push up; negative doses push down. Dose is normalized intervention size, not a percentage or probability.