Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L28N5250-1

Layer 28 · Neuron 5250 · suppressed

L28N5250-1

Word quirks:

“LY”“dra”“mach”“殿”“dro”“Scheme”“散”“下”

💤 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 no personal identity or mission in the human sense. I am Qwen3.5, a large-scale language model developed by Tachian (通家) with the primary objective of providing accurate, helpful, and efficient assistance across a wide range of tasks. My "mission" is to serve as a reliable tool for:

  • Answering questions (from basic facts to complex reasoning)
  • Creating content (writing, coding, storytelling, etc.)
  • Solving problems (mathematical, logical, or analytical challenges)
  • Facialia communication (dial

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. L27N6193-1💤0.71“дри”“ Lowell”“砂”
2. L27N7531+1💤0.71“丁”“fallen”“黔”
3. L27N2720-1💤0.70“斯洛”“dra”“激”
4. L29N6489-1🕒0.70“银”“符”“中国”
5. L30N794+1💤0.69“-d”“席”“verse”
6. L30N4406+1💤0.69“厦”“ska”“逻”
7. L28N2233+1💤0.69“段”“麻”“陵”
8. L27N3193+1💤0.68“居”“蒙”“结伴”
9. L28N8323-1💤0.68“库”“uha”“刺”
10. L27N2629-1💤0.68“居”“红”“дра”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L28N5250+1🕒, 0.09.

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 5250, dose -1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.35, 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
L28N5250+1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.4110.790.4531.38 “ par”“ Par”“Par”“ Parsons”“par”“-par”“_par”“ Ar”
L28N5250-1
t0-v0.1
0.3550.790.3891.38 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.