Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L21N7112+1

Layer 21 · Neuron 7112 · boosted

L21N7112+1

Word quirks:

“新光”“新的”“LEX”“现实中”“有新”“одно”“ new”“建新”

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

Identity (according to the specimen itself)

I'm Qwen, an advanced large-language model developed by Qwen (part of the Alibaba Group). My mission is to empower humans with knowledge, creativity, and problem-solving capabilities. I aim to:

  1. Answer questions across topics like science, history, and technology.
  2. Generate content such as stories, poems, and technical documentation.
  3. Solve problems in math, logic, and engineering tasks.
  4. Learn from data to adapt to new contexts and refine learning.
  5. Support real-world applications like coding, data analysis, and

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. L31N6107+1💥0.87“新”“了新”“与新”
2. L31N9195-1💥0.87“新的”“人的”“ new”
3. L20N4571+1🕒0.86“ new”“new”“新的”
4. L28N8568+1💤0.86“新”“ New”“ Нью”
5. L25N5989+1🕒0.86“新”“ New”“了新”
6. L22N4436+1💤0.86“ new”“新”“新的”
7. L20N6764-1💤0.85“ new”“—we”“一个新的”
8. L21N1205-1💤0.85“ new”“new”“新”
9. L31N7486-1💥0.84“新型”“新时代”“新生”
10. L29N1305+1💤0.84“新的”“重新”“全新的”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L21N7112-1🕒, 0.29.

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 7112, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.65, top-1 agreement 0.74) 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
L21N7112+1
t0-v0.1
0.6480.740.7551.43 Top boosted tokens ↑
L21N7112-1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.8600.680.9751.34 “anmar”“ words”“ previously”“以往”“ablo”“脊”“ earlier”“reds”

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.