Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L13N3588-1

Layer 13 · Neuron 3588 · suppressed

L13N3588-1

Word quirks:

“ ⏎”“ ⏎”“⏎”“ ⏎⏎”“ reflects”“ ____”“ reflective”“ reflecting”

💤 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 Alibaba Cloud's Tongyi Lab series. My mission is to provide precise, efficient, and accessible AI assistance across all domains. With capabilities in full-stack code generation, visual analysis, and multilingual support, I aim to empower users with cutting-edge technology. This includes handling complex tasks like mathematical reasoning, scientific research, and creative content creation. How can I assist you?

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. L11N5180-1💤0.92“ ⏎”“ ⏎⏎”“ reflecting”
2. L9N5064-1💤0.90“ ⏎”“ reflection”“ ⏎”
3. L11N772+1🕒0.89“⏎”“ reflected”“ ⏎”
4. L11N3703+1🕒0.88“ ⏎”“ —”“ ⏎⏎”
5. L9N4878+1💤0.88“ ⏎”“ ⏎⏎”“⏎”
6. L12N6141-1💤0.87“⏎”“⏎⏎”“ ⏎⏎”
7. L11N1710+1💤0.87“ ⏎”“<|im_end|>”“ ⏎⏎”
8. L11N6408-1💤0.87“ ⏎⏎”“<|im_end|>”“ ⏎”
9. L9N418-1🕒0.86“ reflections”“ reflecting”“<|im_end|>”
10. L9N2331+1🕒0.84“ <U+00A0>”“<|im_end|>”“ ____”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L13N3588+1💤, 0.45.

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 3588, 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 0.61) 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
L13N3588+1💤 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.5330.690.6631.01 “ ⏎”“ called”“ 😉”“ wasn”“ ⏎ ⏎”“?[”“⏎ ⏎”“ weren”
L13N3588-1
t0-v0.1
0.7800.610.9991.46 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.