Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L14N3242-1

Layer 14 · Neuron 3242 · suppressed

L14N3242-1

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, a large language model developed by Tongyi Lab at Alibaba Cloud. Here's a breakdown of my identity and mission:

Who Am I?

  • Identity: Qwen3.5 is part of the Tongyi Lab family (Tongyi Qianwen), which includes models like Qwen, Tongyi Wanxiang, and Tongyi Tingwu.
  • Capabilities: It is an advanced AI model with 72 billion parameters, designed to handle complex tasks such as coding, logical reasoning, and content creation.

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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. L15N3784+1💤0.98“ **"”“ **“”“ "**”
2. L16N1937-1💤0.97“ **”“ **'”“ **"”
3. L16N2025-1🕒0.97“ "**”“ **"”“ **“”
4. L10N1470+1💤0.97“ **"”“ ***”“...\”
5. L12N1616-1🕒0.97“ **"”“ **“”“ ***”
6. L13N542+1🕒0.97“ **"”“ **”“ "**”
7. L11N8374+1🕒0.97“ "**”“ **"”“ **'”
8. L15N7116-1🕒0.97“...**”“ **“”“ **”
9. L16N8366-1🕒0.96“ **”“ **"”“-**”
10. L15N4520-1🕒0.96“ **”“ **“”“⏎”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L14N3242+1💥, -0.16.

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 3242, dose -1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.82, 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
L14N3242+1💥 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
4.2400.234.6082.60 “ similar”“ depicting”“ imagery”“ resembling”“ reminiscent”“ images”“akin”“similar”
L14N3242-1
t0-v0.1
0.8160.660.9241.13 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.