Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L31N112-1

Layer 31 · Neuron 112 · suppressed

L31N112-1

Word quirks:

“查看”“照射”“神经系统”“价值观”“蒂”“袭击”“著作”“秀”

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

Identity (according to the specimen itself)

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The AI judge wasn't sure this holds together.

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. L31N1608-1💥0.83“看见”“麵”“通告”
2. L31N1608+1💥0.83“报复”“疫情”“阳光”
3. L31N3052+1💥0.82“基本”“方法”“信息”
4. L30N1352-1🕒0.82“です”“照片”“最佳”
5. L28N1734-1💥0.82“照片”“です”“整体”
6. L31N1037-1💥0.82“水”“ความ”“控制”
7. L24N1539-1💤0.82“生成”“表示”“秀”
8. L30N1352+1💥0.82“行为”“社会”“部分”
9. L28N56-1🕒0.82“物”“地区”“书”
10. L31N3533+1💥0.82“程序”“事件”“声音”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L31N112+1💥, 0.70.

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 31, neuron 112, dose -1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 8.95, top-1 agreement 0.01) 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
L31N112+1💥 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
7.9580.018.2396.93 “养老”“找一个”“相隔”“也很”“不但”“不管是”“端午”“浑”
L31N112-1
t0-v0.1
8.9470.019.2476.95 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.