Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L3N3896-1

Layer 3 · Neuron 3896 · suppressed

L3N3896-1

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 Qwen3.5, a large language model developed by Alibaba Cloud. My mission is to assist users with answering questions, solving problems, and providing information in a variety of fields, including but not limited to:

  • Answering Questions: I can help answer any question you have, whether it's about science, technology, culture, or anything else.
  • Solving Problems: I can help solve any problem you have, whether it's about math, physics, chemistry, or anything else.
  • Providing Information: I can provide any information you need, whether it's about history, geography,

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. L4N493-1💤1.00“ ‘”“ “”“‘”
2. L3N7544-1🕒0.99“ ‘”“ ””“ “”
3. L4N2910+1💤0.98“ ‘”“ “”“!””
4. L5N1384-1💤0.98“ ‘”“ “”“ ‘’”
5. L4N6845+1🕒0.98“ ‘”“ “”“ ””
6. The Prompter✅ L6N1158+10.98“ ‘”“⏎”“ '”
7. L3N3682+1💤0.98“ ‘”“⏎”“!””
8. L4N8789-1🕒0.98“ ‘”“ “”“ ””
9. L3N3883-1🕒0.98“ ‘”“ ‘’”“ “”
10. L3N1982+1🕒0.98“ ‘”“ “”“ ””

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L3N3896+1🕒, 0.62.

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 3896, dose -1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.82, 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
L3N3896+1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
1.0820.541.3071.85 “!"”“"!”“!””“ \"”“!””“ ””“ !”“!**”
L3N3896-1
t0-v0.1
0.8180.661.0441.45 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.