Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L11N7422-1

Layer 11 · Neuron 7422 · suppressed

L11N7422-1

Word quirks:

“ "**”“ often”“ **"”“ always”“ usually”“ ****”“ **”“ sometimes”

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

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. L10N6397+1💤0.90“ sometimes”“ **"”“ "**”
2. L12N7556+1💤0.90“ sometimes”“ often”“ **"”
3. L12N8138-1💤0.90“ **”“ "**”“ **"”
4. L10N7725+1💤0.88“ **"”“ often”“ usually”
5. L13N7866-1💤0.87“ often”“ typically”“ **”
6. L10N7577+1💤0.87“ usually”“ **“”“ **”
7. L9N5822-1🕒0.87“ usually”“ often”“ sometimes”
8. L8N945+1💤0.86“ usually”“ **"”“ **“”
9. L10N9065+1🕒0.86“ often”“ usually”“ **"”
10. L13N6619-1💤0.86“ often”“ typically”“ usually”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L11N7422+1🕒, 0.07.

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 7422, dose -1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.63, top-1 agreement 0.73) 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
L11N7422+1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
2.0290.462.2911.74 “ counterparts”“ counterpart”“ versions”“ contrast”“ version”“ parallels”“ same”“ usual”
L11N7422-1
t0-v0.1
0.6310.730.7951.10 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.