Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L3N1045+1

Layer 3 · Neuron 1045 · boosted

L3N1045+1

Word quirks:

“ ‘”“ '”“⏎”“ \"”“ `”“.`”“?\”“‘”

💤 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 an AI assistant designed to provide you with high-quality information and support. My mission is to help you understand complex concepts and answer your questions accurately. I am here to serve you with the best possible answers.

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. L5N6555-1🕒0.98“ \"”“ '”“ ‘”
2. L6N5202-1🕒0.98“⏎”“ ‘”“ '”
3. L5N7460+1🕒0.97“ ‘”“⏎”“ '”
4. L4N9145+1🕒0.97“⏎”“ ‘”“ \"”
5. L3N5664-1🕒0.97“ ‘”“ '”“⏎”
6. L3N1969-1🕒0.96“⏎”“ ‘”“‘”
7. L7N7037+1🕒0.96“ '”“ ‘”“⏎”
8. The Clinger✅ L3N4163-10.96“⏎”“<|im_end|>”“ '”
9. L6N2026-1💤0.96“⏎”“ ‘”“ \"”
10. L8N3465-1🕒0.96“ ‘”“ '”“?\”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L3N1045-1🕒, 0.00.

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 3, neuron 1045, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.99, top-1 agreement 0.66) 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
L3N1045+1
t0-v0.1
0.9910.661.1821.60 Top boosted tokens ↑
L3N1045-1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
2.4010.442.8292.49 “ solution”“<|im_end|>”“ solutions”“ existence”“ Solution”“⏎”“ mathematical”“ solve”

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.