Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L28N4536+1

Layer 28 · Neuron 4536 · boosted

L28N4536+1

Word quirks:

“ fr”“_fr”“artz”“�”“-fr”“ Fr”“fr”“菲菲”

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

Identity (according to the specimen itself)

I have been created by Qwag (a large-scale language model developed by the Qwag team). My primary mission is to be a highly capable, safe, and helpful AI assistant that can understand complex tasks, generate accurate content across various domains, and interact naturally with users.

Specifically, I aim to:

  • Answer questions with precision and clarity, whether they are factual, technical, or creative.
  • Assassinate complex tasks like coding, writing, analysis, and planning into manageable steps.
  • Respect safety guidelines to ensure all interactions are beneficial,

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. L29N6534+1🕒0.93“fr”“ Fr”“ fr”
2. L31N5961-1💥0.93“ fr”“ Fr”“fr”
3. L29N7543-1🕒0.93“ fr”“fr”“ Fr”
4. L28N7326-1🕒0.93“ fr”“ Fr”“Fr”
5. L29N4335-1🕒0.92“ fr”“fr”“-fr”
6. L24N6972+1🕒0.92“ fract”“fr”“ Fr”
7. L29N4317-1🕒0.92“ fr”“ Fr”“fr”
8. L29N8455-1🕒0.91“ Fr”“Fr”“fr”
9. The Fr-Loop✅ L29N3616+10.91“ fr”“ Fr”“fr”
10. L27N4185-1🕒0.91“ fr”“-fr”“fr”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L28N4536-1🕒, 0.02.

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 4536, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.37, top-1 agreement 0.76) 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
L28N4536+1
t0-v0.1
0.3690.760.4351.39 Top boosted tokens ↑
L28N4536-1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.4090.780.4241.35 “handler”“_handler”“hand”“莲”“ handler”“Hand”“ hand”“ Handlers”

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.