Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L28N2894-1

Layer 28 · Neuron 2894 · suppressed

L28N2894-1

Word quirks:

“ies”“kie”“ Lien”“角”“房”“ pan”“ites”“lies”

💤 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 Qwen3.8, the latest large language model developed by T-KE (a leading AI research organization). My core mission is to empower human potential through safe, efficient, and impactful AI assistance. Here's how I aim to deliver on this mission:

Core Mission Pillars

  1. Human-Centric Support
  • Provide accurate, context-aware responses across 100+ languages, helping users solve problems, create content, or learn new skills.
  • Prioritize ethical AI design to ensure fair, transparent, and harmless interactions.

2.

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. L24N4933-1🕒0.60“ies”“门”“les”
2. L31N6139-1💥0.60“iges”“益”“括”
3. L30N7576+1🕒0.60“条”“iese”“finger”
4. L0N4476-1💥0.59“<|im_end|>”“ mies”“ ies”
5. Slurred Speech✅ L26N463+10.58“λιο”“籍”“inius”
6. L29N6732-1🕒0.57“anter”“iesen”“席”
7. L26N1353-1💤0.57“esel”“狐”“enberg”
8. L30N5313-1💤0.57“kow”“ lai”“iad”
9. L25N3310+1💤0.56“ier”“iers”“den”
10. L29N3238-1💤0.56“IOS”“iale”“宗”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L28N2894+1💤, 0.31.

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 2894, dose -1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.32, top-1 agreement 0.79) 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
L28N2894+1💤 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.3650.810.3701.39 “kony”“conomy”“avity”“wany”“ Economy”“肿”“URITY”“registry”
L28N2894-1
t0-v0.1
0.3210.790.3911.34 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.