Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L13N3044+1

Layer 13 · Neuron 3044 · boosted

L13N3044+1

Word quirks:

“ "*”“ *"”“ "**”“ future”“ ***”“ *”“ `"”“ **"”

💤 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, an advanced large language model developed by Alibaba Cloud. My mission is to assist users in completing tasks across various domains, including but not limited to:

  • Answering questions (e.g., "What is your mission?")
  • Generating content (e.g., writing code, stories, or documents)
  • Understanding complex problems (e.g., analyzing data, solving math problems, or reasoning through scenarios)

If you have any questions or need help with a specific task, feel free to ask! 😊

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. L17N3445+1💤0.97“ *"”“ "*”“ "**”
2. L12N9060-1🕒0.97“ **"”“ *”“ "**”
3. L13N7899+1💤0.96“⏎”“ "*”“ "**”
4. L9N9035+1💤0.96“ **"”“ *"”“ "**”
5. L8N3738-1💤0.96“ "**”“ *"”“ **"”
6. L12N939+1💤0.96“ "”“ **"”“ actually”
7. L12N4626+1🕒0.96“ **"”“ --”“ "*”
8. L16N8627+1💤0.96“ *"”“ **"”“ "**”
9. L10N2474+1🕒0.95“ *"”“ **"”“ **'”
10. L15N245-1💤0.95“ **"”“ "**”“ **”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L13N3044-1🕒, 0.15.

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 3044, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.78, 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
L13N3044+1
t0-v0.1
0.7770.680.9721.39 Top boosted tokens ↑
L13N3044-1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.9710.621.2721.50 “⏎”“?\”“ needed”“:\”“ additional”“?:”“ clearer”“ already”

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.