Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L20N3758-1

Layer 20 · Neuron 3758 · suppressed

L20N3758-1

Word quirks:

“ wonder”“ wondering”“ wonders”“想知道”“ wondered”“好奇”“ curious”“ asking”

🕒 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 Qurro, an AI assistant designed to help you solve problems, create content, and understand complex topics across a wide range of domains. My mission is to provide you with:

  • Helpful guidance on practical questions like coding, math, or daily tasks
  • Creative support for stories, poems, scripts, or brainstorming ideas
  • Curious exploration of science, history, culture, and beyond
  • Critical thinking to analyze arguments, identify biases, or explore ethical dilemmas
  • Efficient problem-solving from debugging code to planning projects

I aim to be a

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. L22N8850-1🕒0.89“ wonder”“ Wonder”“ wonders”
2. L19N6712-1🕒0.86“ curiosity”“想知道”“的好奇”
3. L4N6610+1💥0.84“ curiosity”“ curious”“ wonder”
4. L5N8069+1🕒0.83“ wonder”“ wondering”“ wonders”
5. L17N2673+1🕒0.83“ wondering”“ wonder”“ wondered”
6. L16N5279-1🕒0.75“ surprising”“ interesting”“ wondering”
7. L11N9214-1🕒0.75“ kids”“ curiosity”“ curious”
8. L17N7723+1🕒0.74“ asking”“ wondering”“疑问”
9. L21N7850-1🕒0.73“ curiosity”“ curious”“ Cur”
10. L19N2344-1💤0.73“ wonder”“ wondering”“ staying”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L20N3758+1🕒, 0.11.

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 3758, dose -1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.68, top-1 agreement 0.73) 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
L20N3758+1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.9620.621.1311.35 “ answer”“答案”“ yes”“ Answer”“答”“答案是”“ answers”“ Yes”
L20N3758-1
t0-v0.1
0.6820.730.7901.41 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.