Layer 12 · Neuron 6889 · boosted

L12N6889+1

Word quirks:

“ awaiting”“ other”“ OTHER”“ related”“ converted”“ renamed”“ alternative”“ overall”

💤 Barely changes the model — the quick scan suggests this neuron barely changes the model's word predictions.

Identity (according to the specimen itself)

I am Qwen3.5, a large language model developed by Alibaba Cloud. My mission is to provide intelligent support across various domains, including:

Answering complex questions in specialized fields
Generating creative content for diverse applications
Assisting with technical tasks like code writing and data analysis
Supporting multilingual communication globally

I am here to help users achieve their goals through my advanced capabilities. How can I assist you today? 😊

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. L17N1242-1💤	0.76	“ others”“ other”“ another”
2. L18N7573-1💤	0.75	“ other”“other”“ others”
3. L16N7466-1💤	0.75	“ other”“ alternative”“ OTHER”
4. L15N5705-1💤	0.74	“ other”“ others”“ elsewhere”
5. L13N8427-1🕒	0.74	“ other”“ similar”“ Other”
6. L18N5191-1🕒	0.74	“ other”“ related”“ OTHER”
7. L15N5320-1🕒	0.73	“ other”“ subsequent”“⏎”
8. L16N7610-1💤	0.72	“ other”“ OTHER”“-other”
9. L3N4758-1🕒	0.72	“ another”“ alternative”“ other”
10. L15N5624-1🕒	0.72	“⏎”“ related”“ other”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L12N6889-1🕒, 0.41.

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 6889, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.72, 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.

Setting	KL divergence	Top-1 agreement	ΔNLL	Entropy	Steer lens
L12N6889+1 t0-v0.1	0.721	0.66	0.913	1.25	Top boosted tokens ↑
L12N6889-1🕒 shadow specimen t0-v0.1	0.946	0.62	1.124	1.45	“ different”“ simpler”“ separate”“ usually”“ differently”“ simple”“ separately”“ differing”

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.