Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L13N2069-1

Layer 13 · Neuron 2069 · suppressed

L13N2069-1

Word quirks:

“ because”“ **”“ ***”“ also”“ **"”“,**”“ *”“ basically”

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

Identity (according to the specimen itself)

Hello! I am Qwen3.5, the latest large language model developed by Tongyi Lab. My name is Tongyi Qianwen (which means "Thousand-Dialogue," reflecting my vast conversational capabilities).

My mission is to be a versatile and efficient assistant across a wide range of tasks—from answering complex questions to generating creative content like stories, writing code, or analyzing data. Whether you're coding, writing documents, or solving math problems, I can handle everything from basic to advanced tasks with high accuracy and speed.

In short: **I am your all-around helper, whether

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. L12N4848-1💤0.87“ **”“ basically”“ **"”
2. L13N3861-1🕒0.86“ actually”“ ***”“ usually”
3. L13N3419-1💤0.86“ **”“ shorter”“ **“”
4. L13N2300-1🕒0.85“ **”“⏎”“ because”
5. L14N2024+1🕒0.85“ *”“ "”“ “”
6. L13N163+1💤0.85“ ***”“⏎”“ **”
7. L13N493-1💤0.85“ **”“ *”“ **"”
8. L11N883-1💤0.84“ ***”“ **”“ ****”
9. L10N1242-1🕒0.84“ **"”“ "**”“ **'”
10. L10N2686-1🕒0.84“ *”“ usually”“ \"”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L13N2069+1💤, 0.38.

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 13, neuron 2069, 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 0.68) 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
L13N2069+1💤 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.7240.640.9421.42 “⏎”“ ‘”“ “”“ focus”“ needed”“ ””“””“ ’”
L13N2069-1
t0-v0.1
0.7150.680.8661.24 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.