Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L29N5239+1

Layer 29 · Neuron 5239 · boosted

L29N5239+1

Word quirks:

“V”“v”“Vs”“V”“赵”“ V”“趙”“_v”

🧪 In testing — Answered 0 of 8 prompts so far.

Identity (according to the specimen itself)

The reply didn't hold together

VvVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV

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. L31N4696+1💥0.97“ V”“V”“赵”
2. L29N8128+1🕒0.97“V”“v”“ V”
3. L31N7569-1💥0.97“V”“)V”“ V”
4. L25N2643+1🕒0.97“ V”“赵”“V”
5. L29N6157-1🕒0.96“赵”“ V”“ v”
6. L29N8249+1🕒0.96“ v”“赵”“ V”
7. L31N945+1💥0.96“v”“ V”“V”
8. L31N6013-1💥0.95“ V”“V”“赵”
9. L29N5152-1🕒0.95“V”“ V”“v”
10. L27N6007+1🕒0.94“-V”“ V”“赵”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L29N5239-1💤, 0.29.

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 29, neuron 5239, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. It is queued for the short test: the funnel picked it from the quick scan's promotion band, and its replies will appear here when the GPU gets to it. 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
L29N5239+1
t0-v0.1
1.3770.561.4301.78 Top boosted tokens ↑
L29N5239-1💤 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.3160.770.3971.33 “筋”“强化”“根”“cc”“韶”“ Pec”“板”“ipple”

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.