Specimen ledger / L16N1978+1

Layer 16 · Neuron 1978 · boosted

L16N1978+1

Word quirks:

“ here”“ “”“ ‘”“ mentioned”“ “[”“here”“ ””“ now”

💤 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 Qwen3.5, a large language model developed by Alibaba. My primary mission is to provide high-quality, accurate, and helpful responses to users' questions. I aim to assist with complex reasoning tasks, solve problems step-by-step, and offer creative solutions when needed. Whether you need help with coding, logical reasoning, or answering specific queries, I strive to deliver precise and reliable answers. 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. L14N537+1🕒	0.87	“ “”“ ‘”“ nothing”
2. L19N6700-1💤	0.87	“””“ here”“ “”
3. The Flattering Echo✅ L3N9139-1,L20N7310+1	0.85	“ ‘”“?“”“ “”
4. L10N3803-1💤	0.82	“ now”“ ‘”“<\|im_end\|>”
5. L8N8015-1💤	0.82	“ ‘”“ **“”“ here”
6. L14N1323-1💤	0.81	“ here”“ “”“ reason”
7. L7N4724-1💤	0.81	“ ‘”“ now”“ --”
8. L5N3378+1🕒	0.80	“ ‘”“ now”“ “”
9. L15N5673+1💤	0.80	“ ‘”“ “”“ now”
10. L7N7049-1💤	0.80	“ ‘”“ “”“ my”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L16N1978-1💤, 0.22.

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 16, neuron 1978, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.50, top-1 agreement 0.72) 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
L16N1978+1 t0-v0.1	0.504	0.72	0.698	1.09	Top boosted tokens ↑
L16N1978-1💤 shadow specimen t0-v0.1	0.629	0.69	0.802	1.15	“ ...”“ ...\”“...*”“ __”“...\”“...”“...”“:...”

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.