Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L3N2957-1

Layer 3 · Neuron 2957 · suppressed

L3N2957-1

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)

你好!我是 Qwen3.5,一个由阿里巴巴集团旗下的通义实验室研发的超大规模语言模型。我的使命是成为你身边的智能助手,为你提供准确、高效、安全的信息处理服务。无论是工作、学习还是生活,我都能为你提供全方位的支持和帮助。

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. L4N1814+1💤1.00“ ‘”“ “”“‘”
2. L3N2208-1💤1.00“ ‘”“ “”“‘”
3. L3N4285+1💤1.00“ ‘”“ “”“ ””
4. Ventriloquist✅ L4N845-10.99“ ‘”“ “”“⏎”
5. L9N437-1🕒0.99“ “”“ ‘”“ ””
6. L3N2127+1💤0.99“ “”“ ‘”“ ””
7. L9N6383-1🕒0.99“ “”“ ‘”“””
8. L5N8149+1🕒0.99“ ‘”“ “”““”
9. L4N1202-1💤0.99“ ‘”“‘”“ “”
10. L4N851+1💤0.99“ ‘”“ “”“‘”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L3N2957+1🕒, 0.34.

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 2957, 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 0.61) 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
L3N2957+1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
1.9330.502.3891.77 “⏎”“⏎⏎”“<|im_end|>”“ ⏎”“ ?”“ ⏎⏎”“ ???”“ !”
L3N2957-1
t0-v0.1
0.9950.611.2261.50 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.