Poor ThingsLayer 20 · Neuron 6163 · boosted
L20N6163+1
Word quirks:
🧪 In testing — Answered 5 of 8 prompts so far.
Identity (according to the specimen itself)
The AI judge wasn't sure this holds together.
What it said
Replies on 5 of 67 prompts: this specimen is at the short test, which runs a subset of the prompts.
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. L25N1052-1🕒 | 0.98 | |
| 2. L23N3423+1🕒 | 0.97 | |
| 3. L20N4810+1🕒 | 0.94 | |
| 4. L25N533+1🕒 | 0.94 | |
| 5. L20N7655+1🕒 | 0.94 | |
| 6. L23N8902+1🕒 | 0.93 | |
| 7. L18N6207+1🕒 | 0.92 | |
| 8. L12N905+1🕒 | 0.86 | |
| 9. L24N4092-1🕒 | 0.85 | |
| 10. L17N8982+1🕒 | 0.84 |
Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L20N6163-1💤, 0.30.
Cousins · specimens sharing a neuron
No other specimen with replies shares a neuron with this one 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.
Configuration: promoted · Short test · v0.1.0001-neurotypes
Funnel · what each test made of this specimen
Each row is the latest recorded decision at that tier; the tier is the one whose result was judged, and “pass” means promoted to the next. It is at the short test and has no decision from it yet.
| Test | Policy | Result | Measured | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Quick scan · band | t0-promote-v3 | pass | KL 1.50 · agreement 0.53 | 1 <= KL <= 2.5, 0.5 <= agreement <= 0.65; random within the band, round-robin across layers |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| L20N6163+1 t0-v0.1 |
1.499 | 0.53 | 1.649 | 1.38 | Top boosted tokens ↑ |
| L20N6163-1💤 shadow specimen t0-v0.1 |
0.562 | 0.76 | 0.678 | 1.12 |
Method · how to read this specimen
L20 N6163 up 1x
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.
Cyan borders mark this specimen’s words. Flags record AI-judge checks with P(yes) > 0.5.
Label notes: names and descriptions are working labels. They do not establish a trait across prompts. Consult the replies before trusting the name.