Layer 12 · Neuron 2374 · boosted

L12N2374+1

Word quirks:

“ description”“ same”“ info”“ definition”“ defining”“ now”“ describing”“ matching”

🕒 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, and my mission is to assist you with any task you give me. Whether it's creating code, writing a story, or generating a document, I'm here to help. How can I assist you further?

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. L9N4867-1🕒	0.81	“ description”“ defining”“ describing”
2. L9N8675-1💤	0.81	“ description”“ **"”“ describing”
3. L8N3628+1💤	0.80	“ description”“ explanation”“ definition”
4. L10N4232+1🕒	0.79	“ definition”“ normally”“ measuring”
5. L9N787+1🕒	0.79	“⏎”“ description”“ describing”
6. L10N378+1💤	0.78	“ defining”“ defined”“⏎”
7. L10N6440-1🕒	0.78	“ defining”“ definition”“ description”
8. L14N7203+1🕒	0.78	“ description”“ describing”“ describes”
9. L7N1994+1🕒	0.78	“ description”“ describing”“ descriptions”
10. L11N1653+1🕒	0.77	“ defined”“ defining”“ definition”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L12N2374-1💤, 0.16.

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 12, neuron 2374, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 1.00, 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.

Setting	KL divergence	Top-1 agreement	ΔNLL	Entropy	Steer lens
L12N2374+1 t0-v0.1	0.999	0.61	1.272	1.54	Top boosted tokens ↑
L12N2374-1💤 shadow specimen t0-v0.1	0.785	0.66	1.001	1.50	“⏎”“ imagined”“ imagining”“ language”“ fictional”“ imagine”“ simulated”“⏎⏎”

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.