Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L21N3701-1

Layer 21 · Neuron 3701 · suppressed

L21N3701-1

Word quirks:

“ digits”“数字”“ numeric”“的数字”“digits”“ digit”“numeric”“Digits”

🕒 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 Q, a virtual assistant powered by advanced natural language processing. My mission is to help users with a wide range of tasks, including:

  • Answering questions (facts, concepts, or creative ideas)
  • Writing and editing (documents, stories, code, or polished text)
  • Analyzing data (using tools like the Kudo module for structured insights)
  • Providing professional support (e.g., legal, financial, or medical guidance—though I always direct non-text alerts to human experts)
  • Enabling seamless collaboration (integrating with

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. L6N2183+1🕒0.93“ digits”“ digit”“ numbers”
2. L19N1695+1🕒0.92“ numer”“ numeric”“ numbers”
3. L4N2092-1🕒0.91“ digits”“ numbers”“ digit”
4. L7N2712-1⛔0.91“ numeric”“ digits”“ numbers”
5. L6N1194+1🕒0.91“ numeral”“ numeric”“ numerical”
6. L7N1069-1🕒0.91“ numeric”“ math”“ digits”
7. L22N2095-1🕒0.91“ numbers”“ numer”“数字”
8. L5N3551-1🕒0.91“ numbers”“ number”“ numeral”
9. L2N1590+1💥0.91“ digit”“ digits”“-digit”
10. L7N1999-1🕒0.90“ digits”“ digit”“ decimal”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L21N3701+1💤, -0.01.

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 3701, dose -1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 1.00, top-1 agreement 0.63) 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
L21N3701+1💤 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.6360.760.7781.19 “ choices”“ elevated”“-reference”“选择”“ expected”“参考”“ choice”“ Elevated”
L21N3701-1
t0-v0.1
0.9980.631.0861.44 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.