Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L29N6224+1

Layer 29 · Neuron 6224 · boosted

L29N6224+1

Word quirks:

“ El”“El”“ el”“eln”“-el”“A”“iel”“ ами”

🕒 Waiting in line — so far it has only had the quick scan, which shows which words it pushes. It was not selected in this round.

Identity (according to the specimen itself)

I am Aria, an AI assistant designed to help you with a wide range of tasks. My primary mission is to be your reliable, accurate, and helpful partner in finding answers, solving problems, and creating new ideas.

Here's how I can assist you:

  • Answer questions on anything from general knowledge to specialized topics.
  • Solve problems step-by-step, whether math, logic, or real-world scenarios.
  • Create content like stories, emails, reports, or code snippets.
  • Analyze information to summarize, compare, or extract key insights.

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. L29N8199-1🕒0.93“ el”“El”“ El”
2. L27N5320-1🕒0.93“ El”“ el”“-el”
3. L30N6913-1🕒0.92“el”“El”“ el”
4. L28N5333-1🕒0.91“ el”“ El”“-el”
5. L31N1572+1💥0.91“EL”“el”“ EL”
6. L26N4373-1🕒0.89“ el”“ els”“ El”
7. L29N7704+1🕒0.88“j”“ el”“_el”
8. L0N3896+1💥0.88“<|im_end|>”“.El”“ EL”
9. L31N2383+1💥0.88“ el”“ El”“El”
10. L29N8934+1🕒0.88“el”“EL”“elm”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L29N6224-1🕒, 0.22.

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 6224, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.48, 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
L29N6224+1
t0-v0.1
0.4800.760.5151.44 Top boosted tokens ↑
L29N6224-1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.3450.810.4351.66 “ Tucker”“roup”“信”“ McN”“�”“omat”“ugat”“BO”

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.