Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L20N314+1

Layer 20 · Neuron 314 · boosted

L20N314+1

Word quirks:

“⏎”“ ⏎”“ ⏎”“ ⏎”“⏎ ⏎”“ ⏎”“⏎ ⏎”“ ⏎ ⏎”

🕒 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'm a large language model designed to help people with tasks like writing, coding, or thinking. My goal is to make information accessible and useful for everyone. I can't:
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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. L16N662-1💤1.00“⏎”“ ⏎”“ ⏎”
2. L15N683-1💤1.00“ ⏎”“⏎”“ ⏎”
3. L15N5504+1💤0.99“ ⏎”“ ⏎⏎”“ ⏎”
4. L13N5740-1💤0.99“⏎”“ ⏎”“ ⏎”
5. L13N429-1💤0.99“⏎”“ ⏎”“ ⏎”
6. L13N1207+1💤0.99“ ⏎”“⏎”“ ⏎⏎”
7. L10N1494-1💤0.99“⏎”“ ⏎”“ ⏎”
8. L16N1924-1💤0.99“ ⏎”“⏎”“ ⏎”
9. L10N3931+1🕒0.98“⏎”“ ⏎”“ ⏎”
10. L15N5003-1💤0.98“⏎”“ ⏎”“ ⏎”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L20N314-1🕒, 0.21.

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 20, neuron 314, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.83, top-1 agreement 0.68) 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
L20N314+1
t0-v0.1
0.8300.680.9651.60 Top boosted tokens ↑
L20N314-1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.7220.690.8261.37 “⏎”“—the”“...”“—.”“…””“….”“……”“—”

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.