Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L11N7487+1

Layer 11 · Neuron 7487 · boosted

L11N7487+1

Word quirks:

“ your”“ you”“ yours”“ Your”“ YOUR”“ yourself”“ my”“ both”

🕒 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. L10N4657+1🕒0.98“ your”“ yours”“ YOUR”
2. L7N7270-1💤0.98“ your”“ my”“ its”
3. L15N8941-1💤0.97“ your”“ you”“your”
4. L17N9192-1🕒0.97“ your”“ you”“ Your”
5. L18N5980-1💤0.97“ your”“ you”“ Your”
6. L15N7151+1🕒0.97“ your”“ Your”“ you”
7. L17N8403+1💤0.97“ yourself”“ your”“ yourselves”
8. L13N7295-1🕒0.97“ your”“ yourself”“ Your”
9. L11N7632-1🕒0.96“ your”“ you”“ Your”
10. L15N8919-1💤0.96“ your”“ you”“ yourself”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L11N7487-1🕒, 0.03.

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 7487, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.99, top-1 agreement 0.59) 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
L11N7487+1
t0-v0.1
0.9880.591.2101.37 Top boosted tokens ↑
L11N7487-1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.8910.661.0891.26 “ exchanged”“ saying”“ between”“ exchange”“ messages”“ words”“ clearer”“ statements”

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.