Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L1N7490-1

Layer 1 · Neuron 7490 · suppressed

L1N7490-1

Word quirks:

“<|im_end|>”“⏎ ⏎”“.`”“⏎”“ ``”“⏎⏎⏎”“⏎⏎”“ parse”

🕒 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 designed to provide comprehensive support for users. My mission involves helping individuals navigate complex challenges with precision and accuracy. I strive to ensure optimal performance while delivering reliable solutions.

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. L2N5375+1🕒0.92“<|im_end|>”“.`”“⏎”
2. L2N7505-1🕒0.91“⏎”“<|im_end|>”“.`”
3. L1N2700-1💥0.91“<|im_end|>”“⏎ ⏎”“⏎⏎”
4. L2N1886-1💥0.91“<|im_end|>”“⏎ ⏎”“.`”
5. L2N2619+1🕒0.91“⏎”“<|im_end|>”“⏎⏎”
6. L1N1075-1🕒0.91“<|im_end|>”“⏎”“.`”
7. L3N75-1🕒0.90“⏎”“<|im_end|>”“⏎⏎”
8. L2N5057+1🕒0.90“<|im_end|>”“⏎”“⏎⏎”
9. L3N7222+1🕒0.90“⏎”“<|im_end|>”“.`”
10. L5N1278+1🕒0.90“⏎”“<|im_end|>”“⏎ ⏎”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L1N7490+1💥, -0.03.

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 7490, dose -1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 2.18, top-1 agreement 0.38) 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
L1N7490+1💥 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
5.4450.075.9884.14 “ techno”“ techn”“<|im_end|>”“ tech”“ technolog”“ zon”“?!”“-tech”
L1N7490-1
t0-v0.1
2.1840.382.6432.42 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.