Layer 15 · Neuron 450 · suppressed

L15N450-1

Word quirks:

“ actually”“ however”“ but”“ though”“ currently”“ even”“ now”“ sometimes”

🕒 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. My mission is to assist users in answering questions, providing information, or engaging in conversation. However, I don't have personal feelings or a specific mission statement like "to help everyone." If you're asking about my capabilities, I can certainly share that! How can I assist you today?

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

Specimen	Similarity	Word quirks
1. L17N7050+1💤	0.88	“ same”“ sometimes”“ actually”
2. L13N2954+1🕒	0.85	“ always”“ now”“ indeed”
3. L13N7744-1🕒	0.84	“ anyway”“ actually”“ sometimes”
4. L16N6400-1🕒	0.82	“ though”“ although”“ sometimes”
5. L12N212+1🕒	0.81	“ sometimes”“ however”“ somehow”
6. L16N165+1💥	0.81	“ but”“ however”“ though”
7. L16N1214-1💤	0.81	“ now”“ anyway”“ nowadays”
8. L17N4381+1💤	0.81	“ nowadays”“ now”“ presently”
9. L13N5530-1💤	0.80	“ already”“ now”“ yet”
10. L18N6662+1🕒	0.80	“ however”“ though”“ nonetheless”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L15N450+1🕒, 0.20.

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 450, dose -1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.72, 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.

Setting	KL divergence	Top-1 agreement	ΔNLL	Entropy	Steer lens
L15N450+1🕒 shadow specimen t0-v0.1	0.668	0.71	0.874	1.18	“ other”“ “”“ ‘”“ otherwise”“ “.”“ similar”“ OTHER”“’autres”
L15N450-1 t0-v0.1	0.716	0.66	0.936	1.46	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.