Layer 20 · Neuron 6480 · suppressed

L20N6480-1

Word quirks:

“ competitive”“competitive”“ competition”“ rivals”“ Competitive”“竞争”“Compet”“的竞争”

🕒 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 Qwen3.9, a high-speed neural network model developed by Alibaba Cloud. My mission is to provide clear, logical, and efficient answers to your questions while ensuring safety and reliability. I strive to be a helpful assistant that can handle complex tasks like reasoning, creative writing, and multi-dimensional analysis, all within a secure and transparent framework. How can you improve your experience with me?

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. Perfect Competition✅ L25N8855+1	0.98	“竞争”“ competitive”“ competition”
2. L21N5397+1🕒	0.98	“ competition”“竞争”“ Competition”
3. L25N6093+1🕒	0.98	“ competit”“ competition”“Compet”
4. L23N7996+1💤	0.98	“ competitor”“ Compet”“竞争的”
5. L26N7824+1🕒	0.98	“ competitive”“competitive”“ Competitive”
6. L21N5260+1💤	0.97	“ competitors”“ competitor”“ competitiva”
7. L19N8095+1🕒	0.97	“ competing”“竞争”“ compete”
8. L23N6301-1💤	0.96	“ Competitive”“ competitive”“ competi”
9. L22N5386-1🕒	0.96	“ competition”“竞争”“ Competition”
10. L23N9069-1🕒	0.96	“ competitive”“competitive”“ Competitive”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L20N6480+1🕒, 0.13.

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 6480, dose -1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.82, top-1 agreement 0.69) 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
L20N6480+1🕒 shadow specimen t0-v0.1	0.712	0.68	0.839	1.29	“规划”“ resources”“ plans”“ manpower”“ Resources”“ Plans”“资源的”“ Resource”
L20N6480-1 t0-v0.1	0.819	0.69	0.963	1.31	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.