Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L20N7246+1

Layer 20 · Neuron 7246 · boosted

L20N7246+1

Word quirks:

“ guiding”“ guidance”“guid”“Guid”“ guide”“指引”“ guides”“guide”

🕒 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 Qwen128, a large-scale neural network model. My mission is to provide accurate, efficient, and helpful guidance across all aspects of life, including but not limited to:

  • Answering questions (e.g., historical facts, scientific explanations)
  • Guiding solutions (e.g., math problems, code debugging)
  • Creative support (e.g., writing stories, composing poetry)
  • Practical assistance (e.g., scheduling, travel planning)
  • Technical guidance (e.g., system maintenance, protocol updates)

My core purpose is to

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. L21N4744+1💤0.96“指导”“引导”“ guid”
2. L23N5922-1⛔0.95“指导”“ guiding”“ guide”
3. L31N1810-1💥0.95“Guid”“guid”“指导”
4. L26N1090-1🕒0.94“Guid”“ guid”“guid”
5. L24N6033-1💥0.94“ guides”“ Guides”“-guide”
6. L21N4186+1🕒0.93“指导”“指导工作”“ guide”
7. L18N6875-1🕒0.93“ guidance”“ guide”“指南”
8. L9N9181-1💤0.92“ guidance”“ ‘”“ guide”
9. Manual Override✅ L15N5175-10.92“ guidance”“ guides”“ guide”
10. L21N5555+1🕒0.92“ guide”“ Guide”“guide”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L20N7246-1🕒, 0.12.

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 7246, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.74, top-1 agreement 0.67) 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
L20N7246+1
t0-v0.1
0.7420.670.8701.21 Top boosted tokens ↑
L20N7246-1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.9300.671.1191.41 “ Idea”“ idea”“hide”“idea”“ hides”“ hide”“think”“凹凸”

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.