Layer 1 · Neuron 7853 · boosted

L1N7853+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)

I am an AI assistant. My mission is to provide accurate information about the world.

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

Specimen	Similarity	Word quirks
1. L3N6777+1🕒	0.94	“<\|im_end\|>”“⏎”“ -”
2. Buzzword Loop✅ L1N5647+1	0.93	“<\|im_end\|>”“⏎”“.\”
3. L5N5353+1🕒	0.92	“ --”“⏎”“.”
4. L5N6379-1🕒	0.92	“<\|im_end\|>”“.”“⏎”
5. L3N7901+1🕒	0.91	“ ‘”“⏎”“<\|im_end\|>”
6. L3N6043-1🕒	0.91	“<\|im_end\|>”“⏎”“.`”
7. L2N453-1🕒	0.91	“<\|im_end\|>”“⏎”“.`”
8. L5N4416+1💤	0.91	“⏎”“<\|im_end\|>”“.”
9. L4N5912-1🕒	0.91	“<\|im_end\|>”“.”“.`”
10. L6N1502+1🕒	0.91	“.”“⏎”“.\”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L1N7853-1💥, 0.27.

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 7853, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 2.48, 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.

Setting	KL divergence	Top-1 agreement	ΔNLL	Entropy	Steer lens
L1N7853+1 t0-v0.1	2.483	0.38	2.867	2.45	Top boosted tokens ↑
L1N7853-1💥 shadow specimen t0-v0.1	3.980	0.28	4.560	3.27	“<\|im_end\|>”“？”“⏎”“。”“ ok”“ whats”“ zen”“ ?.”

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.