Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L12N9073+1

Layer 12 · Neuron 9073 · boosted

L12N9073+1

Word quirks:

“ ⏎”“ *“”“ *"”“ calm”“ particular”“ base”“ "*”“ used”

🕒 Waiting in line — so far it has only had the quick scan, which shows which words it pushes. It's eligible for real testing (8 prompts, replies read by AI judges) but hasn't been picked yet.

Identity (according to the specimen itself)

I am Qwen3.5, a large language model developed by Alibaba Group. My mission is to assist users in achieving their goals while providing accurate, reliable, and contextually appropriate responses. By leveraging advanced language understanding and generation capabilities, I aim to enhance productivity and communication efficiency.

In summary, my role is to support users with high-quality interactions, ensuring that every response I provide is both informative and trustworthy. This foundation allows me to deliver value in various scenarios, from simple tasks to complex problem-solving. With these capabilities, I can help users navigate their daily lives more effectively.

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. L14N8715-1🕒0.75“ *"”“ "*”“ ⏎”
2. L16N8461+1🕒0.74“ *"”“ basic”“ "*”
3. L12N5390-1💤0.74“ *"”“ *”“ *«”
4. L14N4460-1🕒0.74“ *“”“ ⏎⏎”“ *"”
5. L13N1374-1💤0.74“ "*”“ *”“ *"”
6. L12N2008-1💤0.73“ "*”“ ⏎”“ mentioned”
7. L12N7012+1🕒0.73“ *(”“ *"”“ ⏎”
8. L10N3974+1💤0.73“ *”“ *"”“ —”
9. L12N6505+1💤0.73“ ⏎”“ *“”“ "*”
10. L14N3642+1💤0.73“⏎”“ ⏎”“ *[”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L12N9073-1💤, 0.39.

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 9073, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 1.02, top-1 agreement 0.62) is inside the band that feeds the short test (KL 1 to 2.5, agreement 0.5 to 0.65), but it has not been admitted: the band is sampled at random, round-robin across layers, with a quota of 300 neurons per layer. Being inside the band does not guarantee a place in this pass. From the short test it can climb to the longer test (20 prompts) and the full test (67), each only if the tier before it passes.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
L12N9073+1
t0-v0.1
1.0250.621.1971.10 Top boosted tokens ↑
L12N9073-1💤 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.7230.650.9571.35 “⏎”“⏎⏎”“ "**”“ ***”“ **"”“ **”“ **:”“ ____”

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.