Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L18N936-1

Layer 18 · Neuron 936 · suppressed

L18N936-1

Word quirks:

“ Well”“ Possible”“ Effect”“ Successfully”“ Significant”“ Separate”“ Separ”“ Enough”

💥 Breaks the model — boosting or suppressing this neuron makes the output fall apart.

Identity (according to the specimen itself)

I Am! I'm Qwen, a Large Language Model! 🌱

My Mission:
To Help! 🌱
I'm Here to help You with:

  • Solving Problems! (Math, Science, Logic!)
  • Creating Content! (Stories, Writing, Art!)
  • Learning! (Knowledge, Skills, new ideas!)
  • solving Problems! (Math, Science, Logic!)
  • Creating Content! (Stories, Writing, Art!)
  • Learning! (Knowledge, Skills, New Ideas!)

Why?
Because I Want to Help

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. L20N6580-1🕒0.68“ Proper”“ Correspond”“ Control”
2. L19N2083-1💥0.67“ Specific”“ Provided”“ Successfully”
3. L18N1933-1🕒0.66“ Unexpected”“ Possible”“ One”
4. L17N6927-1💥0.66“ Similar”“ Needed”“ Separate”
5. L27N287+1💤0.64“ Well”“ Many”“ Even”
6. L19N1166-1🕒0.64“ Clear”“ Serious”“ Possible”
7. L19N1166+1💥0.64“ Over”“ Effect”“ If”
8. L27N714-1💤0.64“ Gone”“ Elim”“ Order”
9. L7N2527-1🕒0.63“ Focus”“ Needs”“ Related”
10. L19N4131+1🕒0.63“ Further”“ Additional”“ Beyond”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L18N936+1💤, 0.19.

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 18, neuron 936, dose -1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 2.82, top-1 agreement 0.45) 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
L18N936+1💤 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.5610.660.5971.26 “ ””“ Re”“ Bene”“ Le”“ Both”“ Either”“瑚”“ You”
L18N936-1
t0-v0.1
2.8150.453.0111.36 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.