Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L27N5205+1

Layer 27 · Neuron 5205 · boosted

L27N5205+1

Word quirks:

“ retrieval”“ Retrie”“ retrieves”“检索”“ retrieving”“ Sof”“ retrieve”“ Retrieve”

💤 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 Q3, a large-scale language model developed by Tengneng (Tengneng AI). My core mission is to provide reliable, safe, and helpful assistance across a wide range of tasks, including but not limited to:

  • Answering questions (from factual retrieval to complex reasoning)
  • Generating content (e.g., stories, scripts, code, or professional documents)
  • Supporting learning and productivity (e.g., summarizing research, debugging code, or creating study plans)
  • Fostering creativity (e11/1

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. L29N6387-1🕒0.98“ retrieved”“ retrieve”“ retrieving”
2. L19N6708+1🕒0.94“ retrieval”“ retrieving”“ releasing”
3. L1N5123+1💥0.94“ retrieval”“ retrieve”“<|im_end|>”
4. L26N8492+1🕒0.94“ retrieve”“ Retrieve”“retrieve”
5. L27N4223+1💤0.94“ retrieved”“ retrieval”“ retrieve”
6. L20N3383+1🕒0.83“ retrieved”“ Retrieved”“ Archived”
7. L8N7972-1🕒0.74“ search”“ access”“ searching”
8. L16N6763+1🕒0.74“ retrieving”“ retrieval”“ recalling”
9. L31N8426+1💥0.73“获取”“fetch”“ fetch”
10. L28N1503-1🕒0.72“trie”“Ret”“re”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L27N5205-1💤, 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 27, neuron 5205, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.39, top-1 agreement 0.78) 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
L27N5205+1
t0-v0.1
0.3910.780.4261.32 Top boosted tokens ↑
L27N5205-1💤 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.4830.780.4551.24 “花”“举手”“辰”“行为”“redits”“Badge”“皇冠”“准”

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.