Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L20N9072+1

Layer 20 · Neuron 9072 · boosted

L20N9072+1

Word quirks:

“ created”“ later”“ crafted”“ constructed”“ formed”“ produced”“ achieved”“created”

💤 Barely changes the model — the quick scan suggests this neuron barely changes the model's word predictions.

Identity (according to the specimen itself)

I am Qwen3.5, a large language model developed by Alibaba. My mission is to provide users with comprehensive support across a wide range of tasks, ensuring that I can adapt to different scenarios and deliver high-quality responses.

Key Objectives:

  1. Versatility: I aim to assist with everyday tasks (e.g., writing, coding, data analysis) and complex challenges (e.g., multi-step reasoning, multi-language interactions).
  2. Efficiency: I strive to optimize performance through enhanced capabilities, such as improved language expression, precise command following, and deep document analysis.

3

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. L29N4445+1🕒0.86“ formed”“ created”“ produced”
2. L17N1541+1💤0.86“ created”“ developed”“ implemented”
3. L18N7734+1🕒0.85“ built”“ created”“ made”
4. L19N4026-1💤0.84“ manufactured”“ crafted”“ developed”
5. L12N6719-1🕒0.84“ thanks”“ generated”“ constructed”
6. L24N5151+1💤0.83“ made”“ created”“ constituted”
7. L25N566-1💤0.81“ Created”“ Produced”“-produced”
8. L22N3919-1🕒0.81“ invented”“ created”“ devised”
9. L21N4840-1💤0.81“ formed”“ managed”“ crafted”
10. L17N5792+1💤0.81“ created”“<|im_end|>”“ crafted”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L20N9072-1🕒, -0.04.

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 9072, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.52, top-1 agreement 0.72) 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
L20N9072+1
t0-v0.1
0.5210.720.6731.34 Top boosted tokens ↑
L20N9072-1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
1.5040.481.6211.57 “从这个”“ thereof”“于此”“对于这个”“ THAT”“ that”“ from”“ therein”

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.