Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L12N3382+1

Layer 12 · Neuron 3382 · boosted

L12N3382+1

Word quirks:

“ **"”“ discussion”“ "**”“ "”“ actually”“ "*”“ "...”“ ("”

🕒 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, the latest iteration in the Qwen series. My mission is to provide comprehensive support across all aspects of user interaction and capability enhancement. Here's how I align with my mission:

  1. Core Capabilities:
  • Multilingual Support: I can fluently communicate in over 100 languages, enabling users to interact in their native tongue while providing accurate translations and context-aware responses.
  • Context Understanding: I can handle long documents or conversations with thousands of tokens, ensuring that the model understands the content and context accurately.
  • **Reasoning and Problem

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. L15N4760+1🕒0.92“ **"”“ "”“ *"”
2. L19N5785+1🕒0.92“ "”“ *"”“ “”
3. L9N572-1💤0.91“ *"”“ *”“ **"”
4. L16N8002-1🕒0.91“ **"”“ "**”“ "”
5. L16N5159+1🕒0.91“ "”“—"”“ "'”
6. L17N1543-1💤0.91“ **"”“ "”“ "**”
7. L17N4083-1💤0.90“ "”“ *"”“ "...”
8. L15N8064-1🕒0.90“ "”“ *"”“ saying”
9. L12N6660-1🕒0.90“ *"”“ "**”“ **"”
10. L9N5573+1💤0.90“ **"”“ "**”“ "”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L12N3382-1🕒, 0.45.

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 3382, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.82, top-1 agreement 0.64) 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
L12N3382+1
t0-v0.1
0.8170.641.0241.31 Top boosted tokens ↑
L12N3382-1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
2.4050.452.6531.58 “<|im_end|>”“ […]”“⏎”“⏎⏎”“⏎ ⏎”“…””“……”“⏎ ⏎”

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.