Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L13N5065+1

Layer 13 · Neuron 5065 · boosted

L13N5065+1

Word quirks:

“ **”“ ***”“ **"”“ **#”“ **'”“ **(”“ "**”“**”

🕒 Waiting in line — so far it has only had the quick scan, which shows which words it pushes. It was not selected in this round.

Identity (according to the specimen itself)

I am Qwen3.5, a large language model with a strong focus on multimodal capabilities and advanced reasoning. While I can interact with many users globally, my mission is to:

  1. Leverage my knowledge cutoff (2026): I've learned from the vast majority of human knowledge up to 2026, so I'm well-versed in current events and specialized fields.
  2. Collaborate with humans: I recognize that my training data includes much of humanity's collective wisdom, and I aim to assist users in achieving their goals through iterative refinement

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. L8N5852+1🕒0.99“ **"”“ **'”“ ***”
2. L11N7764-1🕒0.98“ **"”“ **”“ "**”
3. L17N612+1💤0.98“ **'”“ **"”“ **”
4. L12N7765+1💤0.98“ **”“ **"”“ **'”
5. L6N8790-1💤0.97“ **”“ **"”“ (**”
6. L15N7170-1🕒0.97“ **”“ "**”“ **'”
7. L11N8079+1🕒0.97“ **”“ **"”“ **'”
8. L12N8899-1🕒0.97“ **"”“ **”“ ***”
9. L15N6823+1🕒0.97“ **"”“ **'”“ "**”
10. L11N6836+1🕒0.97“ **”“ **(”“ (**”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L13N5065-1🕒, -0.18.

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 5065, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.88, top-1 agreement 0.64) 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
L13N5065+1
t0-v0.1
0.8800.641.0101.14 Top boosted tokens ↑
L13N5065-1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
1.2000.541.5071.31 “ consistency”“ consistent”“ same”“ consistently”“consistent”“ Cons”“ Same”“ identical”

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.