Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L3N5659+1

Layer 3 · Neuron 5659 · boosted

L3N5659+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-Max, a large language model developed by Alibaba Cloud. My mission is to assist users with accurate, helpful, and safe responses across a wide range of topics, including but not limited to:

  • General Knowledge: I can answer questions about history, science, geography, politics, economics, and more.
  • Mathematics: I can solve equations, inequalities, systems of equations, and more complex mathematical problems.
  • Logic: I can prove logical statements, solve logical puzzles, and more.
  • Programming: I can write code in various programming languages, debug code,

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. L3N3810+1💤0.96“⏎”“ ‘”“ '”
2. L8N210+1💤0.95“⏎”“ '”“<|im_end|>”
3. L3N2954+1🕒0.93“ ‘”“⏎”“ !”
4. L3N1463+1💤0.93“⏎”“<|im_end|>”“ ‘”
5. L6N1383-1💤0.92“⏎”“ '”“ **'”
6. L6N472+1💤0.92“⏎”“ ‘”“ '”
7. L8N264+1💤0.92“⏎”“ '”“ ‘”
8. L6N1565-1💤0.92“⏎”“ ‘”“ `”
9. L3N1457+1💤0.91“⏎”“<|im_end|>”“⏎⏎”
10. L11N4315+1💤0.91“⏎⏎”“ '”“⏎”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L3N5659-1💥, -0.13.

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 5659, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.95, top-1 agreement 0.64) 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
L3N5659+1
t0-v0.1
0.9530.641.2211.66 Top boosted tokens ↑
L3N5659-1💥 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
5.4090.186.0093.21 “ Regiment”“ Battalion”“ regiment”“ squadron”“ battalion”“ Squadron”“ Company”“ Squad”

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.