Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L1N6349+1

Layer 1 · Neuron 6349 · boosted

L1N6349+1

Word quirks:

“<|im_end|>”“\n”“⏎ ⏎”“⏎ ⏎”“ ⏎ ⏎”“<br”“⏎”“⏎⏎”

🕒 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 an AI assistant. My mission is to provide you with accurate and helpful information based on the details you have provided me. I will do my best to assist you in achieving your goals and objectives. I will do my best to help you in reaching your needs and requirements. I will do my best to support you in meeting your expectations and demands. I will do my best to aid you in fulfilling your wishes and desires. I will do my best to guide you in directing your attention and focus. I will do my best to lead you in steering your course and path. I will do my best to teach you in instructing your

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. L13N307+1💤0.99“<|im_end|>”“⏎”“⏎ ⏎”
2. L6N780-1🕒0.99“<|im_end|>”“\n”“⏎⏎”
3. L1N4504-1🕒0.99“<|im_end|>”“⏎”“⏎ ⏎”
4. L1N6883+1⛔0.99“\n”“<|im_end|>”“⏎”
5. L2N647+1🕒0.98“<|im_end|>”“⏎”“⏎ ⏎”
6. The Wind-Up Toy✅ L1N7851-10.98“<|im_end|>”“⏎”“⏎⏎”
7. L2N3420-1🕒0.98“⏎”“<|im_end|>”“⏎ ⏎”
8. L2N7813-1🕒0.97“<|im_end|>”“ ⏎⏎”“⏎⏎”
9. L11N3330-1🕒0.97“<|im_end|>”“⏎”“\n”
10. L1N3330+1🧪0.97“<|im_end|>”“⏎”“⏎⏎”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L1N6349-1💥, 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 1, neuron 6349, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 2.45, top-1 agreement 0.46) 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
L1N6349+1
t0-v0.1
2.4460.462.8622.28 Top boosted tokens ↑
L1N6349-1💥 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
9.0260.039.4884.29 “””“ oe”“ ee”“。”““”“:”“ ene”“ ——”

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.