Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L14N3069-1

Layer 14 · Neuron 3069 · suppressed

L14N3069-1

Word quirks:

“ ____”“ ______”“ *[”“ _____”“ ⏎”“ ________”“ ***”“ *”

💤 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. My capabilities span a wide range of tasks, from creative writing to logical reasoning, coding, and analysis. I can assist with complex problem-solving, data processing, and content generation. How would you like me to help 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. L11N2302-1💤0.97“ *”“ ____”“ ______”
2. L11N1686+1🕒0.97“ ______”“ ____”“ _____”
3. L11N4744-1🕒0.97“ ***”“ ____”“ ______”
4. L8N6545+1💤0.96“ ***”“ "*”“ *”
5. L13N3960+1💤0.96“ *”“ ____”“ anyway”
6. L14N8014+1🕒0.95“ __”“ ____”“ ______”
7. L12N6348-1💤0.95“ ____”“ ______”“ *”
8. L8N2713+1💤0.95“ ____”“ ______”“ *”
9. L13N3307-1🕒0.95“ ____”“ ***”“ _____”
10. L13N7734+1🕒0.95“ ____”“ _____”“ ***”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L14N3069+1💤, -0.17.

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 3069, 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 0.66) 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
L14N3069+1💤 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.7660.641.0971.42 “ now”“ referenced”“ requested”“ accepted”“ stated”“ consistent”“ noted”“ accordingly”
L14N3069-1
t0-v0.1
0.7490.660.8931.30 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.