Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L28N7236-1

Layer 28 · Neuron 7236 · suppressed

L28N7236-1

Word quirks:

“墩”“amina”“MONTH”“宗”“orda”“зин”“pars”“瓶”

💤 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 Q3.5, a large language model developed by the Q3 team. My core mission is to provide helpful, accurate, and safe responses across a wide range of tasks, including:

  • Answering questions (from basic facts to complex reasoning)
  • Creating content (stories, documents, code, emails, etc.)
  • Solving problems (math, logic, debugging, planning)
  • Learning and adapting to new information or user needs
  • Respecting safety guidelines to avoid harm, bias, or disinformation

I aim to

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. L30N1545-1💤0.75“ Diz”“omba”“enza”
2. L28N7380+1💤0.74“居”“玉”“rano”
3. L28N3894-1💤0.74“宗”“农”“sem”
4. L27N6354+1🕒0.73“marker”“ostr”“ifero”
5. L29N9175+1💤0.73“相”“abrik”“博士”
6. L24N8643+1💤0.73“牙”“ahn”“坛”
7. L27N521+1💤0.73“zir”“ZEN”“威”
8. L30N5983-1💤0.72“基”“翰”“ekar”
9. L29N7351+1💤0.72“宗”“ORT”“序”
10. L24N7761-1💤0.72“unta”“人头”“ardia”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L28N7236+1🕒, 0.20.

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 7236, 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 0.81) 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
L28N7236+1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.9150.590.9361.20 “ mat”“mat”“Mat”“ Mat”“ мат”“ مات”“/mat”“ matt”
L28N7236-1
t0-v0.1
0.3210.810.4081.43 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.