Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L31N2231-1

Layer 31 · Neuron 2231 · suppressed

L31N2231-1

Word quirks:

“该内容”“服务态度”“个人隐私”“工作上的”“报名时”“苹果手机”“被客户”“他们需要”

💥 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. L31N5050+1💥0.81“和支持”“所以在”“问题是”
2. L31N3052+1💥0.81“基本”“方法”“信息”
3. L31N3368+1💥0.80“信息咨询”“保存图片”“喜怒哀”
4. L5N1944+1💥0.80“需要”“快速”“满足”
5. L29N2368-1🕒0.80“相关的”“根据不同的”“了我的”
6. L27N8961-1💤0.80“教育的”“文件的”“反应的”
7. L2N1592+1💥0.79“注册”“官方”“官网”
8. L30N2295+1💤0.79“公司提供”“要求进行”“客户提供”
9. L31N8718-1💥0.79“差的”“增加的”“油的”
10. L31N8567-1💥0.79“资料”“专业”“规定”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L31N2231+1💥, -0.03.

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 2231, dose -1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 5.08, top-1 agreement 0.26) 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
L31N2231+1💥 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
5.8640.136.21810.00 “ enjo”“ inexp”“ distra”“ Iphone”“ Whatsapp”“ docum”“ youre”“ sms”
L31N2231-1
t0-v0.1
5.0810.265.3109.57 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.