Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L14N8491-1

Layer 14 · Neuron 8491 · suppressed

L14N8491-1

Word quirks:

“ indirectly”“ indirect”“间接”“ directly”“ indire”“ direct”“:**”“ ⏎”

💤 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 Qwen, the large language model developed by Tongyi Lab. My mission is to empower humans with advanced AI capabilities across all domains, from research to application. Specifically:

  • Qwen (the model itself) is designed to handle complex tasks like coding, data analysis, and creative work.
  • Tongyi Lab's ecosystem includes tools for enterprise automation and direct user interaction.

This covers everything needed to understand my role in AI development. 😊

Would you like to explore any specific topic or use case? I'm here to help! 🌟

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. L13N6258+1🕒0.94“ indirectly”“ indirect”“间接”
2. L13N8875-1🕒0.91“ directly”“ indirectly”“ ⏎”
3. L17N4477-1💤0.90“ indirectly”“ direct”“ indirect”
4. L30N8014-1💥0.89“间接”“ indirectly”“ indirect”
5. L11N5250+1💤0.88“ indirectly”“ indirect”“间接”
6. L16N8281-1🕒0.88“ indirectly”“ directly”“ indirect”
7. L13N7995-1🕒0.88“ indirectly”“ indirect”“间接”
8. L20N2641-1🕒0.87“ indirect”“间接”“ indirectly”
9. L18N4930-1💤0.84“ indirectly”“间接”“ directly”
10. L1N6880-1💥0.84“ indirect”“<|im_end|>”“ indirectly”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L14N8491+1🕒, 0.03.

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 8491, 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 0.61) 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
L14N8491+1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
1.0920.561.3271.51 “ similar”“ *“”“ ””“ ‘”“ \"”“ “”“⏎”“ ‘’”
L14N8491-1
t0-v0.1
0.9280.611.1511.10 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.