Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L28N2395-1

Layer 28 · Neuron 2395 · suppressed

L28N2395-1

Word quirks:

“ required”“required”“ Required”“ asked”“Required”“ REQUIRED”“_required”“⇥required”

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

Identity (according to the specimen itself)

I Qwen3.5 is a large language model developed by the required entity (Qwen). My mission is to provide accurate, helpful, and safe information across a wide range of domains, including but not limited to:

  • Answering questions in general knowledge, science, technology, and more.
  • Solving complex problems in mathematics, logic, and code generation.
  • Creating content such as articles, stories, scripts, and creative writing.
  • Analyzing documents and extracting key insights from text, tables, or charts.
  • Assisting with programming tasks, debugging

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. L24N2742+1🕒0.98“ required”“required”“ Required”
2. L21N5736+1🕒0.98“ required”“-required”“required”
3. L25N8747-1🕒0.98“ required”“ Required”“required”
4. L26N5968-1🕒0.97“ required”“ requested”“ Required”
5. L0N4216+1💥0.95“<|im_end|>”“ Required”“ required”
6. L20N4401+1🕒0.94“ required”“-required”“ Required”
7. L20N7220-1🕒0.94“ required”“ viable”“ necessary”
8. L20N1312-1🕒0.94“ required”“ Required”“-required”
9. L21N2780-1🕒0.94“ mandatory”“-required”“ required”
10. L26N2523-1🕒0.93“ required”“要求”“ Required”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L28N2395+1💤, -0.11.

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 28, neuron 2395, dose -1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.31, 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
L28N2395+1💤 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.2680.860.2611.37 “ux”“综”“喜”“衡”“耀”“ems”“众”“UX”
L28N2395-1
t0-v0.1
0.3120.770.3941.22 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.