Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L14N4707-1

Layer 14 · Neuron 4707 · suppressed

L14N4707-1

Word quirks:

“...*”“...”“...\”“?...”“ maybe”“ seems”“ seem”“ --”

🧪 In testing — Answered 0 of 8 prompts so far.

Identity (according to the specimen itself)

I am Qwen3.5, a large language model trained by Google. Could you please help me understand your mission?

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. L14N1257-1🕒0.88“ seems”“...\”“ seem”
2. L16N7087+1💤0.87“—"”“—I”“ seems”
3. L5N1563+1🕒0.85“<|im_end|>”“...”“...\”
4. L5N7580+1🕒0.85“...”“...\”“...””
5. L12N509-1💤0.83“ seems”“ seem”“...*”
6. L15N1452-1🕒0.83“ seems”“...””“ maybe”
7. L4N2204+1🕒0.82“<|im_end|>”“...”“⏎”
8. L14N3161+1💤0.81“⏎”“ seems”“ --”
9. L10N8448-1🕒0.81“...””“...\”“?...”
10. L12N2073+1🕒0.81“...”“ perhaps”“...\”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L14N4707+1🕒, 0.27.

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 4707, dose -1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. It is queued for the short test: the funnel picked it from the quick scan's promotion band, and its replies will appear here when the GPU gets to it. 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
L14N4707+1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
1.1640.601.4381.67 “⏎”“⏎⏎”“ **“”“ then”“:"”“ **"”“ now”“ "**”
L14N4707-1
t0-v0.1
1.0150.591.2311.30 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.