Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L14N5768+1

Layer 14 · Neuron 5768 · boosted

L14N5768+1

Word quirks:

“”:”“⏎⏎”“’:”“:”“ ⏎⏎”“":”“?:”“<|im_end|>”

💤 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. I am an AI assistant designed to assist users with complex tasks, including advanced reasoning, coding, and visual analysis. My capabilities include:

  1. Multilingual Support: I support over 100 languages worldwide, including English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and other major global languages.
  2. Specialized Capabilities: I can handle tasks involving math, science, and creative writing, as well as advanced reasoning and data analysis.
  3. Multimodal capabilities: I can process and analyze images, including detailed object detection

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. L16N942+1🕒0.94“”:”“:”“":”
2. L15N4086+1🕒0.94“:”“⏎⏎”“⏎”
3. L12N117+1🕒0.93“.:”“”:”“’:”
4. L7N1578+1🕒0.93“”:”“":”“<|im_end|>”
5. L16N7217-1🕒0.92“”:”“⏎⏎”“":”
6. L12N3067-1🕒0.92“⏎”“⏎⏎”“:”
7. L12N7271+1🕒0.92“<|im_end|>”“⏎⏎”“:”
8. L14N2735-1💤0.92“⏎”“⏎⏎”“”:”
9. Groundhog✅ L5N4590+1,L11N1276-10.92“⏎⏎”“”:”“:”
10. L16N8205+1🕒0.92“?:”“⏎⏎”“":”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L14N5768-1💤, -0.04.

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 5768, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.93, 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
L14N5768+1
t0-v0.1
0.9330.661.2021.43 Top boosted tokens ↑
L14N5768-1💤 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.9040.631.0801.83 “ maybe”“ what”“ basically”“ info”“ probably”“ our”“ possibly”“ because”

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.