Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L11N5047+1

Layer 11 · Neuron 5047 · boosted

L11N5047+1

Word quirks:

“ ⏎”“ ⏎⏎”“ ⏎”“ ONLY”“ ⏎”“⏎”“ correctly”“ ␍⏎”

🕒 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)

Answered — readability check pending

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. L11N1943+1🕒0.95“ ⏎”“ ⏎”“ ⏎”
2. L8N6110+1💤0.94“ ⏎”“ ⏎”“ ⏎⏎”
3. L12N7701+1💤0.94“ ⏎”“ ⏎”“ ⏎⏎”
4. L8N4472+1🕒0.94“ ⏎”“ ␍⏎”“ ⏎⏎”
5. L9N8272-1🕒0.94“ ⏎”“ ⏎⏎”“⏎”
6. L8N1382-1💤0.94“ ⏎”“ ⏎⏎”“ ⏎”
7. L2N439-1💤0.94“ ⏎”“ ⏎”“⏎”
8. L10N4972-1🕒0.94“ ⏎”“ ⏎”“ ⏎⏎”
9. L11N3753-1🕒0.94“ ⏎”“ ⏎⏎”“ ␍⏎”
10. L8N2533+1💤0.94“ ⏎”“ ⏎⏎”“⏎”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L11N5047-1🕒, -0.06.

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 5047, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.88, top-1 agreement 0.63) 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
L11N5047+1
t0-v0.1
0.8790.631.1291.44 Top boosted tokens ↑
L11N5047-1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.8920.641.1191.40 “ specifically”“ specific”“ particular”“ whatever”“ since”“ studied”“ whenever”“ supposedly”

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.