Layer 11 · Neuron 6469 · boosted

L11N6469+1

Word quirks:

“ now”“ earlier”“ previously”“ my”“ favour”“ emphas”“ recently”“ crucial”

💤 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 Qwen3.5, a large language model developed by Alibaba Cloud. My mission is to provide high-quality, accurate, and context-aware assistance tailored to your needs. Whether you require detailed explanations, complex problem-solving, or creative content generation, I aim to deliver reliable support with minimal errors and efficient responses.

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. L13N7958+1🕒	0.81	“ now”“ recently”“ certain”
2. L9N3479+1💤	0.80	“ now”“ previously”“ my”
3. L12N8323+1🕒	0.79	“ previously”“ previous”“ recently”
4. L8N4337-1💤	0.78	“ now”“ previously”“ recently”
5. L9N6286+1🕒	0.78	“ now”“ previously”“ recently”
6. L14N2056-1💤	0.78	“ previously”“ recently”“ once”
7. L10N4311+1🕒	0.78	“ now”“ previously”“ recently”
8. L7N3442-1🕒	0.77	“ now”“ yesterday”“ today”
9. L17N8968+1💤	0.77	“ previously”“ formerly”“ earlier”
10. L13N8732+1🕒	0.77	“ myself”“ my”“ sometimes”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L11N6469-1🕒, 0.18.

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 6469, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.66, top-1 agreement 0.68) 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
L11N6469+1 t0-v0.1	0.661	0.68	0.857	1.27	Top boosted tokens ↑
L11N6469-1🕒 shadow specimen t0-v0.1	1.786	0.43	2.121	2.11	“ comparison”“ every”“ comparisons”“ comparing”“ compared”“ ANY”“!””“ any”

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.