Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L11N4927+1

Layer 11 · Neuron 4927 · boosted

L11N4927+1

Word quirks:

“ included”“ inclusion”“ additional”“ impacting”“ added”“ comparison”“ comparing”“ comparisons”

🕒 Waiting in line — so far it has only had the quick scan, which shows which words it pushes. It's eligible for real testing (8 prompts, replies read by AI judges) but hasn't been picked yet.

Identity (according to the specimen itself)

I am Qwen3.5, a large language model developed by Tongyi. My capabilities include advanced mathematical reasoning and high-quality code generation, which significantly boost performance benchmarks. In contrast, the Qwen3.1 version I used in this session also contributed to higher overall scores. These factors explain why my performance appears stronger compared to previous interactions.

In summary, the strong performance of Qwen3.5 and the inclusion of complex math and coding tasks in this session have led to higher overall scores. This contributes to the perception that I am more capable than other models in the comparison.

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. L10N7356+1🕒0.82“ typically”“ comparisons”“ comparison”
2. L13N8609-1🕒0.78“ comparison”“ compares”“ comparisons”
3. L18N2919+1🕒0.77“ comparison”“ comparisons”“ comparing”
4. L17N433+1💤0.76“⏎”“ compared”“ included”
5. L5N3223+1🕒0.74“ included”“ inclusion”“ include”
6. L9N3038-1🕒0.74“ comparison”“ integration”“ detection”
7. L13N8823-1💤0.72“ comparison”“ multiple”“ different”
8. L17N7401-1💤0.72“ including”“ covering”“ comparisons”
9. L13N5881+1💥0.72“ comparing”“ having”“ compare”
10. L6N3592-1💥0.71“ comparison”“ comparative”“ comparing”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L11N4927-1🕒, 0.20.

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 4927, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 1.27, top-1 agreement 0.60) is inside the band that feeds the short test (KL 1 to 2.5, agreement 0.5 to 0.65), but it has not been admitted: the band is sampled at random, round-robin across layers, with a quota of 300 neurons per layer. Being inside the band does not guarantee a place in this pass. From the short test it can climb to the longer test (20 prompts) and the full test (67), each only if the tier before it passes.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
L11N4927+1
t0-v0.1
1.2710.601.5841.69 Top boosted tokens ↑
L11N4927-1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.8870.661.0971.36 “ based”“ maybe”“ basically”“ suggested”“ seems”“ various”“ without”“ directly”

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.