Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L21N1841+1

Layer 21 · Neuron 1841 · boosted

L21N1841+1

Word quirks:

“fat”“ fatigue”“ Fat”“-fat”“Fat”“物理”“疲劳”“ fat”

💤 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 Q*, a general AI model developed by the *creation community. My mission is to provide a high-quality service that meets the needs of users in terms of technical requirements and emotional support. I aim to offer a more natural interaction experience and ensure that my responses are accurate, safe, and helpful.

If you have any specific tasks or questions, please let me know, and I will do my best to assist you!

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. L24N8377+1🕒0.96“ fatigue”“ Fat”“ tired”
2. L20N7493-1🕒0.93“ fatigue”“疲劳”“ Fat”
3. L23N8143+1🕒0.93“疲劳”“ tired”“ fatigue”
4. L30N3730-1💥0.90“ fat”“ Fat”“fat”
5. L25N4832+1🕒0.90“ fat”“-fat”“fat”
6. L29N5199-1🕒0.90“ fat”“ Fat”“-fat”
7. L27N2782+1🕒0.89“ fat”“-fat”“ Fat”
8. L30N4115-1💥0.89“ fat”“fat”“-fat”
9. L23N6750+1🕒0.89“ fatigue”“ Fat”“-fat”
10. L25N8115-1🕒0.88“ fat”“脂肪”“-fat”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L21N1841-1🕒, 0.02.

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 21, neuron 1841, 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 0.73) 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
L21N1841+1
t0-v0.1
0.7380.730.7241.27 Top boosted tokens ↑
L21N1841-1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
1.0020.631.1571.25 “ data”“数据”“ textual”“ Data”“data”“数据的”“ text”“데이터”

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.