Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L11N772+1

Layer 11 · Neuron 772 · boosted

L11N772+1

Word quirks:

“⏎”“ reflected”“ ⏎”“⏎⏎”“ ⏎”“ ⏎⏎”“ ⏎⏎”“ reflecting”

🕒 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)

I am Qwen3.5, a large language model with an enhanced context window. I don't have specific information about my identity or mission. How about you tell me more about yourself?

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. L12N6141-1💤0.96“⏎”“⏎⏎”“ ⏎⏎”
2. L11N1392-1💤0.93“⏎”“⏎⏎”“ important”
3. L8N3596-1🕒0.92“ ⏎⏎”“ ⏎”“ ⏎⏎”
4. L9N2289-1💤0.90“⏎”“ ⏎”“ ⏎”
5. L11N7935+1💤0.90“ ⏎⏎”“⏎”“⏎⏎”
6. L9N6720-1💤0.90“ ⏎”“ ⏎⏎”“ ⏎”
7. L11N1710+1💤0.90“ ⏎”“<|im_end|>”“ ⏎⏎”
8. L8N479-1💤0.89“ ⏎”“ ⏎⏎”“ ⏎”
9. L11N3166+1🕒0.89“ ⏎”“ ⏎⏎”“⏎”
10. L9N402+1💤0.89“⏎”“ ⏎”“ ⏎⏎”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L11N772-1🕒, 0.04.

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 772, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.91, top-1 agreement 0.61) 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
L11N772+1
t0-v0.1
0.9080.611.0941.37 Top boosted tokens ↑
L11N772-1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.8970.661.1981.52 “ core”“ implied”“ somehow”“ whatever”“ *”“ truth”“ simulated”“ formed”

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.