Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L11N4027-1

Layer 11 · Neuron 4027 · suppressed

L11N4027-1

Word quirks:

“ special”“ specially”“ ⏎”“ always”“ ourselves”“ ‘”“ Special”“ specific”

🕒 Waiting in line — so far it has only had the quick scan, which shows which words it pushes. It was not selected in this round.

Identity (according to the specimen itself)

I am Qwen3.5, an advanced language model designed to assist users with complex tasks that go beyond standard text generation. My capabilities include handling intricate reasoning, generating high-quality content for specific contexts, and providing solutions tailored to the user's needs.

My mission is to empower users by enabling them to:

  • Solve complex problems requiring deep reasoning.
  • Create content that aligns with the user's goals and the context of their conversation.
  • Provide assistance in specialized domains where the user's expertise is required.

In essence, I aim to be a partner who can help users achieve their objectives through sophisticated language manipulation and

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

SpecimenSimilarityWord quirks
1. L10N7106+1💤0.87“ always”“ special”“ ‘”
2. L8N6983+1🕒0.84“ special”“ specially”“ especial”
3. L8N4166-1🕒0.84“ special”“ specially”“ ‘”
4. L8N6210+1🕒0.84“ special”“ specific”“ specially”
5. L15N7374-1🕒0.84“ special”“ specific”“ now”
6. L8N782-1💤0.84“ '”“ special”“ richer”
7. L13N8734-1🕒0.83“ special”“ specially”“ now”
8. L13N5933+1🕒0.83“ special”“ specially”“ **“”
9. L9N4781-1🕒0.83“ special”“ specially”“ your”
10. L17N7484+1🕒0.83“ special”“ Special”“ Specific”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L11N4027+1🕒, -0.00.

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 11, neuron 4027, dose -1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.82, top-1 agreement 0.69) 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.

SettingKL divergenceTop-1 agreementΔNLLEntropySteer lens
L11N4027+1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.8480.671.0691.29 “ “”“ initially”“ because”“ `"”“ *"”“ "”“ supposedly”“ apparently”
L11N4027-1
t0-v0.1
0.8220.690.9921.38 Top boosted tokens ↑

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.