Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L13N7734+1

Layer 13 · Neuron 7734 · boosted

L13N7734+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 a large language model with extensive knowledge. How can I assist 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. L10N6885+1🕒0.97“ ⏎”“ ______”“ ***”
2. L15N3702-1🕒0.97“ ____”“ __”“⏎”
3. L13N3514-1🕒0.97“⏎”“ ⏎”“ ____”
4. L7N6450-1💤0.97“ ⏎”“⏎”“ ____”
5. L12N903-1💤0.97“ __”“ ______”“ ____”
6. L12N2232-1💤0.97“ ____”“ ***”“⏎”
7. L10N1677-1💤0.97“ ____”“ ⏎”“ ______”
8. L12N4093-1🕒0.96“ *”“ —”“ ____”
9. L8N4918+1💤0.96“ ______”“ ____”“ _____”
10. L11N1686+1🕒0.96“ ______”“ ____”“ _____”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L13N7734-1🕒, -0.08.

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 7734, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.90, top-1 agreement 0.62) 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
L13N7734+1
t0-v0.1
0.8970.621.1451.31 Top boosted tokens ↑
L13N7734-1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.9640.591.3141.23 “ discontinued”“ temporarily”“停用”“ ceased”“ no”“ removed”“ stopped”“ stop”

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.