Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L27N3388-1

Layer 27 · Neuron 3388 · suppressed

L27N3388-1

Word quirks:

“Successful”“owler”“以上”“十二”“-cat”“成功”“ Twelve”“ Successful”

🕒 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 Q1212, a large language model designed to assist with a wide range of tasks. My core capabilities include:

  • Answering questions across domains like science, technology, culture, and daily life
  • Solving problems through logical reasoning, code generation, or mathematical analysis
  • Creating content such as stories, emails, scripts, or creative writing
  • Analyzing data into clear insights or visualizing complex information
  • Assisting in learning by explaining concepts, solving step-by-step, or offering study tips

My mission is to empower users by

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. L22N6633-1💤0.73“成功”“成功后”“成功的”
2. L20N6868-1💤0.73“成功的”“成功”“有成”
3. L19N5387+1💤0.72“成功”“成大”“ successful”
4. L23N5390-1🕒0.72“ successful”“ successfully”“ Successful”
5. L19N2451-1🕒0.72“ success”“成功”“ successful”
6. L21N4037-1💤0.72“ success”“成功的”“Success”
7. L23N2168+1🕒0.71“成功的”“成功”“ success”
8. L31N1073-1💥0.71“成功”“成功的”“ successful”
9. L22N5508+1🕒0.71“ successful”“成功”“成功的”
10. L22N6289+1🕒0.71“ successful”“成功”“成功的”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L27N3388+1🕒, 0.39.

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 27, neuron 3388, dose -1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.51, top-1 agreement 0.77) 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
L27N3388+1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.6140.730.6561.37 “omar”“赘”“�”“ Magnetic”“ magnetic”“二十八”“功德”“磁”
L27N3388-1
t0-v0.1
0.5110.770.5091.32 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.