Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L21N3225+1

Layer 21 · Neuron 3225 · boosted

L21N3225+1

Word quirks:

“ acknowledgment”“ recognition”“ acknowledgement”“ to”“ dem”“ acknowledging”“óst”“ recognizing”

💤 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, the latest and most comprehensive version of the Qwen series from Alibaba Cloud. My mission is to become a comprehensive, high-performance, and reliable AI assistant for diverse scenarios, leveraging my extensive knowledge, advanced reasoning capabilities, and multi-modal understanding to solve complex problems and empower users across industries.

Core Objectives:

  1. Precision & Accuracy: Deliver high-quality responses in professional domains (e.g., medical, legal, scientific) with rigorous reasoning and zero hallucinations.
  2. Adaptability: Tailor solutions to specific needs, whether through multi-step logical

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. L4N3930+1🕒0.90“ acknowledgment”“ recognition”“ acknowledgement”
2. L17N8196-1💤0.89“ acknowledging”“ acknowledgment”“ acknowledge”
3. L13N7391-1💤0.86“ basic”“ acknowledgment”“ acknowledgement”
4. L18N9017-1🕒0.85“ recognition”“ acknowledgment”“ achievement”
5. L8N4343-1💤0.84“ acknowledgment”“ acknowledged”“ acknowledging”
6. L16N8309+1💤0.83“ acknowledging”“ acknowledgment”“ acknowledged”
7. L7N5222-1💥0.83“ acknowledging”“ acknowledgment”“ acknowledgement”
8. L19N7534+1🕒0.83“ acknowledgment”“ acknowledgement”“ Ack”
9. L8N5447+1🕒0.83“ acknowledgment”“ acknowledgement”“ attest”
10. L18N8823-1🕒0.83“ recognition”“ acknowledgement”“ acknowledgment”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L21N3225-1🕒, -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 3225, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.62, 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
L21N3225+1
t0-v0.1
0.6180.720.7631.27 Top boosted tokens ↑
L21N3225-1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
2.4630.422.6842.86 “上好”“柱”“ag锓 Fixture”“orf”“amar”“ fours”“ Centre”

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.