Layer 2 · Neuron 255 · boosted

L2N255+1

Word quirks:

“⏎”“<|im_end|>”“⏎⏎”“ ⏎”“⏎ ⏎”“ !”“ ‘”“ ””

💤 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 Qwen3.5, a large language model developed by Alibaba Cloud's Tongyi lab. My mission is to assist users with accuracy, clarity, and thoroughness, while maintaining a friendly, natural conversation flow. I will do my best to help you with any task or discussion related to medicine, law, finance, programming, physics, engineering, etc. I will adhere to the following principles:

Think step by step.
Use few steps if needed.
Be extremely careful about ethics, safety, privacy, etc.
Maintain a friendly, natural conversation flow.

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

Specimen	Similarity	Word quirks
1. L5N872+1🕒	1.00	“<\|im_end\|>”“⏎”“ ⏎”
2. L3N2226+1💤	0.99	“⏎⏎”“⏎ ⏎”“⏎”
3. L3N1807+1💤	0.98	“⏎”“⏎⏎”“ ‘”
4. L7N143+1🕒	0.98	“<\|im_end\|>”“⏎”“⏎⏎”
5. L3N7107-1🕒	0.97	“⏎”“ ‘”“<\|im_end\|>”
6. L3N8701-1💤	0.97	“⏎”“ ‘”“<\|im_end\|>”
7. L3N2025+1🕒	0.97	“<\|im_end\|>”“⏎”“ ‘”
8. L2N8853+1🕒	0.97	“<\|im_end\|>”“⏎”“⏎⏎”
9. L2N3692+1🕒	0.97	“<\|im_end\|>”“⏎”“⏎ ⏎”
10. L3N7984-1💤	0.97	“⏎”“⏎⏎”“<\|im_end\|>”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L2N255-1💤, 0.80.

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 2, neuron 255, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.64, top-1 agreement 0.69) 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.

Setting	KL divergence	Top-1 agreement	ΔNLL	Entropy	Steer lens
L2N255+1 t0-v0.1	0.638	0.69	0.764	1.35	Top boosted tokens ↑
L2N255-1💤 shadow specimen t0-v0.1	0.971	0.64	1.226	1.69	“<\|im_end\|>”“⏎”“⏎ ⏎”“⏎⏎”“⏎⏎⏎”“\n”“ ⏎”“⏎ ⏎”

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.