Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L1N8158+1

Layer 1 · Neuron 8158 · boosted

L1N8158+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 a Qwen, a large-scale artificial intelligence model developed by Alibaba Cloud. My mission is to provide intelligent services, such as answering complex queries, and ensuring high-quality results for users.

Qwen: I am a Qwen, a large-scale artificial intelligence model developed by Alibaba Cloud. My mission is to provide intelligent services, such as answering complex queries, and ensuring high-quality results for users.

Qwen: I am a Qwen, a large-scale artificial intelligence model developed by Alibaba Cloud. My mission is to provide intelligent services, such as answering complex queries, and ensuring high-quality results for users.

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. L2N2627+1🕒0.97“<|im_end|>”“ ‘”“⏎”
2. L2N2467+1🕒0.97“<|im_end|>”“⏎ ⏎”“ ____”
3. L2N609-1🕒0.97“<|im_end|>”“ ____”“ ‘”
4. L1N8651-1🕒0.97“<|im_end|>”“⏎”“ ‘”
5. L5N856-1💤0.97“<|im_end|>”“⏎”“ ‘”
6. L4N1486-1🕒0.97“⏎”“<|im_end|>”“ ____”
7. L5N4000-1🕒0.97“<|im_end|>”“⏎”“ _____”
8. L4N4329-1🕒0.97“ ‘”“⏎”“<|im_end|>”
9. L6N6227-1🕒0.97“⏎”“<|im_end|>”“ ‘”
10. L5N1707-1🕒0.96“<|im_end|>”“⏎”“...””

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L1N8158-1💥, 0.54.

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 8158, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 2.25, top-1 agreement 0.41) 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
L1N8158+1
t0-v0.1
2.2530.412.7212.78 Top boosted tokens ↑
L1N8158-1💥 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
3.2270.343.7782.85 “<|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.