Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L25N6428+1

Layer 25 · Neuron 6428 · boosted

L25N6428+1

Word quirks:

“ Par”“ par”“主”“ пар”“ Gord”“Par”“ paro”“atk”

🕒 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 Qwask, a large language model developed by the Qask Team. My primary purpose is to provide helpful, accurate, and contextually relevant responses to users across a wide range of topics.

My mission is to:

  • Enhance human productivity by offering efficient solutions for work, study, and daily tasks.
  • Promote understanding by explaining complex ideas in accessible ways and fostering meaningful conversations.
  • Ensure safety and ethics by adhering to rigorous guidelines that prevent harm, respect privacy, and maintain a positive, non-judamental approach.
  • **Support learning 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. L28N7827+1🕒0.86“ par”“par”“ Par”
2. L28N8312-1🕒0.86“ par”“ Par”“ox”
3. L28N3716-1🕒0.86“ par”“par”“ Par”
4. L27N7396-1💤0.85“par”“-par”“ight”
5. L28N5954+1🕒0.85“范”“par”“-par”
6. L28N6652+1💤0.85“par”“Par”“ par”
7. L28N6806-1🕒0.85“-par”“par”“ par”
8. L28N6777+1🕒0.85“ Par”“Par”“par”
9. L28N6892+1🕒0.84“ par”“石”“par”
10. L25N6213+1🕒0.84“ par”“-par”“par”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L25N6428-1💤, 0.10.

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 25, neuron 6428, 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 0.69) 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
L25N6428+1
t0-v0.1
0.7410.690.7341.36 Top boosted tokens ↑
L25N6428-1💤 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.5560.760.5701.25 “资产”“iba”“Asset”“坝”“激励机制”“规范的”“莞”“ Asset”

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.