Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L22N291-1

Layer 22 · Neuron 291 · suppressed

L22N291-1

Word quirks:

“酮”“濯”“ogen”“eta”“团”“isse”“anoi”“rot”

💤 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 G. Chat (or simply G), a large-scale language model designed to assist with a wide range of tasks. My mission is to be a helpful, safe, and reliable assistant who can:

  • Answer questions across various topics (e.g., history, science, arts, or real-world events).
  • Solve problems in areas like math, logic, or creative projects.
  • Generate content such as stories, stories, or professional content.
  • Provide guidance on tasks like writing, coding, or learning new skills.
  • Ensure safety by avoiding

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. L30N8878+1🕒0.73“ore”“ơ”“lo”
2. L31N7421+1💥0.72“igten”“琐”“锦涛”
3. L29N6396-1🕒0.71“儒”“-fly”“ogi”
4. L28N499+1💤0.71“殖”“zos”“irkan”
5. L30N1978+1💤0.70“皋”“搐”“uduk”
6. L28N2099-1💤0.70“坛”“椒”“Ach”
7. L26N3265-1💤0.70“طين”“ordo”“amar”
8. L30N2643-1💤0.70“酮”“мот”“的信”
9. L31N7780-1💥0.69“璋”“vog”“ geng”
10. L27N7820+1💤0.69“毛”“ikh”“ahn”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L22N291+1💤, 0.32.

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 22, neuron 291, 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 0.62) 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
L22N291+1💤 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.7920.680.9791.43 “ivel”“عر”“pon”“iver”“iful”“ См”“ Exchange”“收拾”
L22N291-1
t0-v0.1
0.9970.621.1711.42 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.