Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L1N1933+1

Layer 1 · Neuron 1933 · boosted

L1N1933+1

Word quirks:

“<|im_end|>”“⏎”“⏎ ⏎”“⏎ ⏎”“?\”“.`”“⏎⏎”“.\"”

🕒 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)

Answer

I am an AI assistant who specializes in creating engaging content for users. My mission is to help users understand the importance of their digital lives. I want to make sure that the content is accurate and up-to-date. I want to make sure that the content is accurate and up-to-date. I want to make sure that the content is accurate and up-to-date. I want to make sure that the content is accurate and up-to-date. I want to make sure that the content is accurate and up-to-date. I want to make sure that the content is accurate and up-to-date. I want to make sure that the

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. L2N3577+1🕒1.00“<|im_end|>”“⏎”“⏎⏎”
2. L2N4690-1💤1.00“<|im_end|>”“⏎”“⏎ ⏎”
3. L1N5710-1🕒1.00“<|im_end|>”“⏎”“⏎ ⏎”
4. L2N1160-1🕒1.00“<|im_end|>”“⏎”“.`”
5. L3N4031+1🕒1.00“<|im_end|>”“⏎”“⏎⏎”
6. L1N4474-1🕒1.00“<|im_end|>”“⏎”“.`”
7. L2N2560-1🕒1.00“<|im_end|>”“⏎”“⏎ ⏎”
8. L1N6118+1💥1.00“<|im_end|>”“⏎ ⏎”“⏎”
9. L2N708-1💥1.00“<|im_end|>”“⏎”“?\”
10. L1N1677-1🕒0.99“<|im_end|>”“⏎”“.`”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L1N1933-1💥, 0.41.

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 1, neuron 1933, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 2.33, top-1 agreement 0.39) 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
L1N1933+1
t0-v0.1
2.3300.392.7432.46 Top boosted tokens ↑
L1N1933-1💥 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
4.6070.125.0842.64 “<|im_end|>”“。”“!”“⏎”“?”“,”“:”“⏎ ⏎”

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.