Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L17N7792-1

Layer 17 · Neuron 7792 · suppressed

L17N7792-1

Word quirks:

“ only”“ ONLY”“ Only”“ specially”“ make”“-only”“ makes”“ making”

🕒 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 Q3, a large language model trained by Google. My primary mission is to serve as a highly capable assistant for anyone who needs help with complex tasks or just wants to chat. Specifically, I can:

  • Answer questions about topics I may not be familiar with (though I'm designed to handle most queries accurately).
  • Write code or debug it.
  • Analyze data or generate reports.
  • Act as a research assistant for academic papers or technical documentation.
  • Chat with other models that have specialized knowledge in specific domains.

If you're not

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. L10N1368+1🕒0.81“ only”“ ONLY”“ alone”
2. L12N7997+1🕒0.81“ only”“ ONLY”“ Only”
3. L14N6165+1💤0.81“ only”“ ONLY”“only”
4. L17N4537+1💤0.81“ only”“ just”“only”
5. L18N5048+1🕒0.80“ only”“ specifically”“ ONLY”
6. L17N7531-1🕒0.80“ only”“ ONLY”“-only”
7. L25N1930-1🕒0.80“ only”“only”“ Only”
8. L17N8702+1🕒0.80“ only”“ Only”“ ONLY”
9. L21N5005+1🕒0.80“ only”“only”“Only”
10. L18N3443+1🕒0.80“ only”“only”“-only”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L17N7792+1🕒, 0.07.

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 17, neuron 7792, dose -1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.63, 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.

SettingKL divergenceTop-1 agreementΔNLLEntropySteer lens
L17N7792+1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.8270.670.9821.26 “ mentally”“想象”“ imagine”“ imagining”“ imagined”“ mental”“ "”“ imaginary”
L17N7792-1
t0-v0.1
0.6350.720.7951.35 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.