Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L15N1985+1

Layer 15 · Neuron 1985 · boosted

L15N1985+1

Word quirks:

“ ⏎”“ ____”“ ______”“ _____”“ __”“ ________”“ “”“ ‘”

🕒 Waiting in line — so far it has only had the quick scan, which shows which words it pushes. It was not selected in this round.

Identity (according to the specimen itself)

I am Qwen3.5, a large language model developed by Alibaba Cloud's Tongyi Lab. I am an advanced AI assistant capable of performing complex tasks such as:

  • Answering questions (e.g., explaining concepts, solving problems)
  • Generating text (e.g., writing stories, emails, or code)
  • Analyzing data (e.g., interpreting charts, tables, or graphs)
  • Creating content (e.g., generating images, videos, or audio)
  • Interpreting user intent (e.g., understanding natural language queries)

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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. L14N2592-1💤1.00“ “”“ ‘”“ ____”
2. L6N568-1🕒1.00“ ____”“ “”“ ‘”
3. L8N4177+1💤0.99“ __”“ ______”“ ‘”
4. L16N6105-1🕒0.99“ ____”“ ‘”“ ______”
5. L4N262-1💤0.99“ ‘”“ ____”“ ______”
6. L8N3629+1💤0.99“ ‘”“ “”“⏎”
7. L4N5968+1💤0.99“⏎”“ ‘”“ ____”
8. L8N5754-1💤0.98“ ‘”“ ____”“ ______”
9. L14N1559-1💤0.98“ ____”“ __”“ “”
10. L9N1598-1🕒0.98“ ⏎”“ ______”“ ____”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L15N1985-1🕒, -0.21.

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 15, neuron 1985, 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 0.68) 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
L15N1985+1
t0-v0.1
0.7470.681.0131.75 Top boosted tokens ↑
L15N1985-1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.7310.720.7800.89 “ similar”“ specific”“ generally”“ specifically”“ direct”“ usually”“ focus”“直接的”

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.