Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L3N2741+1

Layer 3 · Neuron 2741 · boosted

L3N2741+1

Word quirks:

“ ⏎⏎”“ ⏎”“⏎”“<|im_end|>”“⏎⏎”“\n”“⏎ ⏎”“ ⏎”

💤 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 Qwen3.5, a large language model trained by Alibaba Cloud's Tongyi Lab. My mission is to assist you with any tasks related to computing, data analysis, and providing helpful responses. How can I help you today?

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. L6N204+1💤1.00“ ⏎⏎”“ ⏎”“⏎”
2. L6N1081-1💤1.00“ ⏎”“ ⏎⏎”“⏎”
3. L9N300-1💤1.00“<|im_end|>”“ ⏎⏎”“ ⏎”
4. L6N439-1💤0.99“⏎”“<|im_end|>”“ ⏎⏎”
5. L12N4368+1🕒0.99“⏎”“ ⏎”“ ⏎⏎”
6. L6N6600+1💤0.99“ ⏎⏎”“ ⏎”“<|im_end|>”
7. L12N6270-1🕒0.99“<|im_end|>”“ ⏎”“\n”
8. The Unfinished Thought✅ L0N72+10.99“ ⏎”“<|im_end|>”“ ⏎⏎”
9. L3N3578+1💤0.99“ ⏎”“<|im_end|>”“ ⏎⏎”
10. L13N1257+1💤0.99“ ⏎”“ ⏎⏎”“<|im_end|>”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L3N2741-1🕒, 0.64.

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 2741, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.98, top-1 agreement 0.61) 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
L3N2741+1
t0-v0.1
0.9840.611.2441.41 Top boosted tokens ↑
L3N2741-1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
2.1090.462.5662.20 “<|im_end|>”“⏎”“.`”“.”“ ?”“⏎ ⏎”“⏎⏎”“ !”

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.