Layer 15 · Neuron 8539 · boosted

L15N8539+1

Word quirks:

“ part”“ involved”“ belonged”“ included”“ belonging”“ belongs”“ belong”“ using”

🕒 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 Qwen, a large language model developed by Alibaba Cloud. My mission is to assist you with answering questions and providing accurate information. Whether you need help with math problems or creative writing, I can support you using my capabilities. How can I assist you?

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. L19N6941-1🕒	0.88	“ within”“ belong”“ belongs”
2. L19N3150-1🕒	0.86	“ belong”“ belongs”“ belonged”
3. L18N8160+1🕒	0.83	“ belonged”“ belong”“ belongs”
4. L17N7764+1🕒	0.83	“ belonged”“ part”“ belong”
5. L22N3283+1💤	0.82	“屬於”“ belong”“ belonged”
6. L17N7425+1🕒	0.82	“ belongs”“ belong”“ belonged”
7. L22N3273-1🕒	0.82	“ belongs”“ belonged”“ belong”
8. L15N8086-1🕒	0.81	“ belongs”“ belonged”“ seems”
9. L2N2791-1💥	0.81	“ belong”“ belongs”“<\|im_end\|>”
10. L19N421-1💤	0.80	“ belongs”“ is”“ because”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L15N8539-1🕒, 0.18.

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 8539, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.85, 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.

Setting	KL divergence	Top-1 agreement	ΔNLL	Entropy	Steer lens
L15N8539+1 t0-v0.1	0.854	0.68	1.098	1.09	Top boosted tokens ↑
L15N8539-1🕒 shadow specimen t0-v0.1	0.709	0.69	0.866	1.17	“ sometimes”“\n”“ seem”“ generally”“ seems”“ basically”“ seemed”“ related”

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.