Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L14N2234-1

Layer 14 · Neuron 2234 · suppressed

L14N2234-1

Word quirks:

“ basically”“⏎”“⏎ ⏎”“ ⏎”“ ⏎”“ ⏎”“ same”“ ⏎ ⏎”

💤 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 Alibaba Cloud's Tongyi Lab. My mission is to empower individuals and organizations to achieve more by providing high-quality assistance across a wide range of capabilities:

  • Who am I: A large multimodal model that supports 200+ languages globally.
  • What is my mission?
  • To be a helpful assistant that can handle complex tasks like writing, coding, math, logic, and scientific research.
  • To assist with creative tasks such as storytelling, scripting, and role-playing.
  • To provide professional-grade tools for

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. L15N2001+1💤0.96“ ⏎”“⏎”“ ⏎”
2. L14N8774-1🕒0.95“ ⏎”“⏎”“ ⏎”
3. L15N8953+1🕒0.95“ ⏎”“⏎”“ ⏎”
4. L9N7107-1💤0.95“ ⏎”“ basically”“⏎”
5. L17N5435+1💤0.94“⏎”“ ⏎”“⏎ ⏎”
6. L9N2718+1🕒0.94“ ⏎”“ ⏎⏎”“ <U+00A0>”
7. L12N2798+1🕒0.94“⏎⏎”“⏎”“ ⏎”
8. L10N5173-1🕒0.94“ ⏎”“⏎”“⏎ ⏎”
9. L17N247+1🕒0.94“ ⏎”“ ⏎”“ ⏎”
10. L8N13+1💤0.94“ ⏎”“⏎”“⏎ ⏎”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L14N2234+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 14, neuron 2234, dose -1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.75, 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
L14N2234+1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
1.9670.412.3222.14 “.</”“!</”“.””“."</”“!””“ .**”“ now”“...</”
L14N2234-1
t0-v0.1
0.7460.691.0001.19 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.