Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L30N1728+1

Layer 30 · Neuron 1728 · boosted

L30N1728+1

Word quirks:

“建筑”“的建筑”“建築”“中国建筑”“建筑的”“房屋”“建筑业”“建筑行业”

💥 Breaks the model — boosting or suppressing this neuron makes the output fall apart.

Identity (according to the specimen itself)

Not asked yet

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. L22N8169+1💤0.92“符号”“ building”“建筑”
2. L23N7812-1🕒0.88“建筑结构”“ buildings”“ houses”
3. L30N1911-1💤0.77“房屋”“状态的”“veg”
4. L0N8004-1💥0.77“房”“房子”“<|im_end|>”
5. L28N8835-1🕒0.76“建设”“建設”“建设与”
6. L25N6674+1🕒0.76“砖”“ architectural”“ Architecture”
7. L31N8250+1💥0.76“建设”“建设的”“建設”
8. L23N4339-1🕒0.76“建设”“建设中”“建设的”
9. L26N8672+1⛔0.76“建设”“建設”“建设中”
10. L24N4014+1💤0.75“ building”“ buildings”“欄”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L30N1728-1💤, 0.15.

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 30, neuron 1728, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 4.01, top-1 agreement 0.19) 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
L30N1728+1
t0-v0.1
4.0090.194.1071.79 Top boosted tokens ↑
L30N1728-1💤 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.3620.840.3931.78 “璐”“上路”“lust”“amina”“ berry”“ellet”“mint”“amis”

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.