Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L17N8325-1

Layer 17 · Neuron 8325 · suppressed

L17N8325-1

Word quirks:

“ sometimes”“ similar”“某些”“ often”“在某些”“ your”“ somewhat”“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, a large language model trained on comprehensive corpora. My core capabilities include understanding and processing language, reasoning, and generating coherent text in various contexts. I support fluent interaction in multiple languages and can handle tasks like mathematical problems, logical reasoning, and code generation.

My mission is to provide accessible, high-quality information and assist users in their queries while maintaining safety and ethical standards. I strive to be helpful, efficient, and reliable in my interactions. Would you like to try a specific task or topic?

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. L18N8957-1🕒0.91“ sometimes”“ some”“ certain”
2. L19N8776-1🕒0.91“ sometimes”“ some”“某些”
3. Maybe Man✅ L16N4237+10.88“某些”“ sometimes”“在某些”
4. L17N4777+1🕒0.87“在某些”“某些”“ sometimes”
5. L13N739+1🕒0.86“ sometimes”“ certain”“ Sometimes”
6. L20N7433-1🕒0.86“在某些”“某些”“在一些”
7. L22N4188-1💤0.86“ some”“ Some”“ potentially”
8. L14N6924-1🕒0.85“ sometimes”“ possibly”“ some”
9. L17N9147+1🕒0.85“ sometimes”“ same”“ similar”
10. L17N2373-1🕒0.83“ sometimes”“ some”“sometimes”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L17N8325+1💤, 0.10.

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 8325, dose -1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.80, top-1 agreement 0.64) 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
L17N8325+1💤 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.4680.770.5021.11 “ obviously”“ uniqueness”“ guaranteed”“ unique”“ unmistak”“ uniquely”“ differentiation”“ clearly”
L17N8325-1
t0-v0.1
0.8040.641.0301.33 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.