Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L2N4373-1

Layer 2 · Neuron 4373 · suppressed

L2N4373-1

Word quirks:

“<|im_end|>”“⏎”“⏎ ⏎”“⏎⏎”“ _____”“ !”“ ____”“ ***”

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

Identity (according to the specimen itself)

I am an AI assistant designed to help with writing essays. My mission is to provide high-quality, well-research, and engaging content on a wide range of topics. I can write about anything from any field of knowledge. How about that?

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. L6N1528+1🕒0.99“<|im_end|>”“⏎⏎”“⏎”
2. L6N1637-1💤0.95“⏎”“<|im_end|>”“⏎⏎”
3. L6N791-1🕒0.95“<|im_end|>”“⏎”“ ____”
4. L2N4282+1🕒0.95“⏎”“<|im_end|>”“⏎ ⏎”
5. L2N610+1🕒0.95“⏎”“<|im_end|>”“⏎ ⏎”
6. L6N1648+1💤0.95“<|im_end|>”“⏎”“⏎⏎”
7. L4N6499+1🕒0.95“⏎”“<|im_end|>”“ ⏎”
8. L6N195+1🕒0.95“<|im_end|>”“⏎”“⏎⏎”
9. L3N5919+1🕒0.95“<|im_end|>”“⏎”“⏎⏎”
10. L6N4185+1💤0.95“⏎”“<|im_end|>”“⏎⏎”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L2N4373+1💥, -0.14.

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 4373, 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
L2N4373+1💥 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
4.7420.155.3253.16 “ conservation”“ conserve”“ Conservation”“ preservation”“守恒”“ preserve”“<|im_end|>”“ conserv”
L2N4373-1
t0-v0.1
1.1820.591.4501.71 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.