Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L12N3952+1

Layer 12 · Neuron 3952 · boosted

L12N3952+1

Word quirks:

“ yourself”“ mentioned”“ clarification”“ clar”“ referenced”“ your”“ ⏎”“ clarified”

🕒 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 developed by Alibaba Cloud. I assist users in completing complex reasoning tasks alongside my own capabilities.

Here's how I contribute to the conversation:

  • I provide 10,000 words of content (e.g., analysis, code generation) as part of my response structure.
  • My knowledge cutoff is 2026, which helps contextualize my answers when discussing recent advancements up to that point.

In summary, while I offer structured insights on topics like data processing, code generation, and logical reasoning, my role is to

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. L12N9158-1💤0.80“ clarified”“ referenced”“ you”
2. L12N4220+1💤0.76“ your”“ clarification”“ implied”
3. L9N6176-1🕒0.76“ ⏎”“ clarified”“ acknowledgment”
4. Hedge Maze✅ L9N2006+10.76“ referenced”“ clarified”“ here”
5. L14N1004-1💤0.75“ clarification”“ clarified”“ clar”
6. L13N8384-1💤0.75“ mentioned”“ clarified”“ also”
7. L9N7510+1💤0.74“ clarified”“ —”“ reference”
8. L12N3736+1🕒0.74“ your”“ understanding”“ clarity”
9. L10N3051+1🕒0.74“ clarity”“ itself”“ literally”
10. L11N5685+1🕒0.74“ ⏎”“ focused”“ clarified”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L12N3952-1💤, 0.12.

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 3952, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.85, top-1 agreement 0.66) 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
L12N3952+1
t0-v0.1
0.8480.661.0881.33 Top boosted tokens ↑
L12N3952-1💤 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.6140.690.7371.05 “ kids”“ earlier”“ before”“ old”“ awaiting”“ \"”“ **"”“ akin”

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.