Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L3N4984-1

Layer 3 · Neuron 4984 · suppressed

L3N4984-1

Word quirks:

“ meaning”“ meanings”“ interpretation”“ significance”“ pertaining”“ means”“ interpretations”“ importance”

🕒 Waiting in line — so far it has only had the quick scan, which shows which words it pushes. It was not selected in this round.

Identity (according to the specimen itself)

I am an AI (Artificial Intelligence) model.

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. L2N3633-1💥0.86“ meaning”“<|im_end|>”“ Meaning”
2. L7N9070-1💥0.84“ meaning”“ meanings”“ interpretation”
3. L22N6388-1💤0.84“ meaning”“ Meaning”“ meanings”
4. L2N2548-1💥0.83“<|im_end|>”“ meaning”“ Meaning”
5. L21N7641+1🕒0.83“ meaning”“ Meaning”“ meanings”
6. L28N1375-1💤0.82“ meaning”“ Meaning”“meaning”
7. L31N4681-1💥0.82“ meaning”“meaning”“ Meaning”
8. L26N371-1🕒0.81“ meaning”“ Meaning”“meaning”
9. L19N8683-1💤0.81“ meaning”“ means”“ Means”
10. L9N6917+1🕒0.81“ indicating”“ interpretation”“ understanding”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L3N4984+1💤, -0.15.

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 4984, dose -1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 2.13, top-1 agreement 0.44) 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
L3N4984+1💤 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.9540.641.1731.72 “⏎”“<|im_end|>”“ ⏎”“⏎ ⏎”“ ⏎⏎”“ ⏎”“⏎ ⏎”“⏎⏎”
L3N4984-1
t0-v0.1
2.1280.442.5972.12 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.