Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L12N7213-1

Layer 12 · Neuron 7213 · suppressed

L12N7213-1

Word quirks:

“ **'”“ **”“ ***”“ **.**”“ ****”“!**”“ our”“ "**”

💤 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, the latest large language model developed by Tongyi Lab. My mission is to provide high-quality assistance across a wide range of tasks, from answering questions to generating creative content. I am designed to be helpful, engaging, and capable of handling complex challenges.

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

SpecimenSimilarityWord quirks
1. L15N355-1💤0.93“ **”“ **"”“ ***”
2. L11N8305-1💤0.93“ **"”“ "**”“ **'”
3. The Highlighter✅ L14N2438+10.93“ *”“ "**”“ **"”
4. L12N6292-1💤0.92“ "**”“!**”“ **"”
5. L14N2236-1💤0.92“ **”“-**”“ ***”
6. L12N2225-1🕒0.91“ **"”“ "**”“ ***”
7. L14N7429+1🕒0.91“,**”“ **”“ **.**”
8. L11N5258+1🕒0.91“ **”“ **"”“ ***”
9. L12N7715-1💤0.91“ ***”“ **”“ **'”
10. L10N7702-1💤0.91“ ***”“ **”“ *”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L12N7213+1💤, 0.21.

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 7213, dose -1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.60, 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
L12N7213+1💤 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.6360.670.7651.18 “<|im_end|>”“⏎”“⏎⏎”“ referenced”“.\”“ ⏎⏎”“\n”“⏎⏎⏎”
L12N7213-1
t0-v0.1
0.6010.660.8801.18 Top boosted tokens ↑

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.