Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L13N6660-1

Layer 13 · Neuron 6660 · suppressed

L13N6660-1

Word quirks:

“ previously”“ now”“ based”“ previous”“ prior”“ info”“ implied”“ before”

💤 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, a large language model developed by Tongyi Lab. My mission is to provide high-quality, reliable information and assistance across a wide range of topics. How can I help you today?

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. L6N7054+1🕒0.88“ before”“ prior”“ previously”
2. L5N5290+1🕒0.87“ previous”“ past”“ prior”
3. L15N5823-1🕒0.86“ previous”“ earlier”“ previously”
4. L11N2964-1💤0.86“ previously”“ previous”“ now”
5. L10N499-1🕒0.86“ previously”“ prior”“ before”
6. L12N7605-1💤0.86“ previous”“ earlier”“ before”
7. L14N8272-1🕒0.86“ previously”“ prior”“ previous”
8. L13N6203+1🕒0.86“ previous”“ previously”“ prior”
9. L9N6964+1💤0.86“ previous”“ previously”“ earlier”
10. L15N1141+1💤0.86“ previous”“ prior”“ now”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L13N6660+1💥, -0.09.

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 6660, dose -1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.61, top-1 agreement 0.69) 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
L13N6660+1💥 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
9.4130.059.8267.05 “CT”“CM”“tage”“COM”“CON”“UM”“BI”“变”
L13N6660-1
t0-v0.1
0.6120.690.8291.21 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.