Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L1N3154-1

Layer 1 · Neuron 3154 · suppressed

L1N3154-1

Word quirks:

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

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

Identity (according to the specimen itself)

I am Qwen2, a large language model trained on the principles of the OpenAI project. I am designed to help users with their specific needs. I am capable of adapting to the user's requirements. I am a versatile AI assistant. I am an intelligent AI system. I am a smart AI. I am a helpful AI. I am a useful AI. I am a practical AI. I am a functional AI. I am a working AI. I am a functioning AI. I am a operational AI. I am a performing AI. I am a executing AI. I am a carrying AI. I am a transporting AI.

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. L1N4550-1💥0.98“<|im_end|>”“⏎”“.\”
2. L1N2369+1💥0.98“<|im_end|>”“.`”“.\”
3. L3N872+1🕒0.97“<|im_end|>”“.`”“⏎”
4. L1N5120-1🕒0.97“<|im_end|>”“.</”“⏎”
5. L2N2396-1🕒0.97“<|im_end|>”“⏎ ⏎”“.\"”
6. L5N244-1🕒0.97“<|im_end|>”“.`”“⏎”
7. L1N7765-1🕒0.97“<|im_end|>”“.`”“.</”
8. Full Stop✅ L4N63-10.97“<|im_end|>”“.`”“⏎”
9. L1N1485-1💤0.96“<|im_end|>”“.`”“.\"”
10. L1N1983+1🕒0.96“<|im_end|>”“.`”“⏎”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L1N3154+1💥, 0.62.

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 3154, dose -1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 2.85, top-1 agreement 0.33) 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
L1N3154+1💥 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
3.3780.263.8452.74 “<|im_end|>”“...””“?\”“⏎”“ ?”“⏎ ⏎”“……”“?"”
L1N3154-1
t0-v0.1
2.8500.333.3252.73 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.