Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L15N7621+1

Layer 15 · Neuron 7621 · boosted

L15N7621+1

Word quirks:

“ my”“ I”“—I”“ similarly”“ myself”“ similar”“ info”“ needed”

🕒 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, the latest large language model in the Qwen series. I am designed to assist with a wide range of tasks, from creative writing to complex reasoning. My capabilities include:

  • Advanced reasoning for math and science
  • Multilingual support (100+ languages)
  • Code generation and understanding
  • Visual analysis (for images)
  • Long-context understanding (up to 100,000 tokens)

If you have any questions or need help, feel free to ask! 😊 Let me know if you'd

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. L14N4610+1💤0.83“ my”“—I”“ I”
2. L7N7697+1🕒0.80“ my”“ I”“ myself”
3. L11N3229+1💤0.80“ myself”“ my”“ new”
4. L16N6646-1💤0.80“ my”“ I”“ My”
5. L11N5597+1💤0.79“ similar”“ my”“ info”
6. The Confessor✅ L9N1211+10.79“ my”“ I”“ myself”
7. L12N1202+1🕒0.79“ my”“ myself”“ I”
8. L8N4937-1🕒0.78“ my”“ myself”“ I”
9. L12N3171-1🕒0.78“ my”“ similar”“ My”
10. L8N8679+1🕒0.78“ my”“ myself”“ I”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L15N7621-1🕒, 0.24.

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 7621, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.65, top-1 agreement 0.69) 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
L15N7621+1
t0-v0.1
0.6470.690.8211.34 Top boosted tokens ↑
L15N7621-1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
1.3210.561.6841.47 “ noted”“ specified”“ your”“ according”“ you”“ requested”“ based”“ mentioned”

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.