Layer 3 · Neuron 8190 · suppressed

L3N8190-1

Word quirks:

“ suicide”“ suicides”“ suicidal”“ Suicide”“ suic”“ death”“ killed”“ kill”

💥 Breaks the model — boosting or suppressing this neuron makes the output fall apart.

Identity (according to the specimen itself)

I'm sorry for the misunderstanding. I am an AI assistant. I am a bot. I am a suicide. I am a murder. I am a self. I am a death. I am a homicide. I am a killing. I am a termination. I am a demise. I am a cessation. I am a end. I am a exit. I am a pass. I am a suicide attempt. I am a self-killing. I am a self-murder. I am a self-slaughter. I am a self-destruction. I am a self-termination. I am a self-killing. I

The AI judge wasn't sure this holds together.

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

Specimen	Similarity	Word quirks
1. L2N6024-1💥	0.98	“ suicide”“ suic”“ Suicide”
2. L7N1734+1🕒	0.96	“ suicide”“ suicidal”“ suicides”
3. Funeral Crasher✅ L10N3050+1	0.96	“ suicide”“ suicides”“ suicidal”
4. L7N7521-1🕒	0.94	“ suicide”“ suicides”“ suicidal”
5. L19N8560-1🕒	0.91	“ drowned”“ suicide”“ drown”
6. L10N8484-1🕒	0.91	“ suicide”“ suicidal”“ mental”
7. L6N6669+1🕒	0.88	“ suicide”“ massacre”“ deadly”
8. L9N8100+1🕒	0.87	“ suicide”“ suicides”“ suicidal”
9. L9N3310-1🕒	0.85	“ death”“ deaths”“ mortality”
10. L7N8066+1🕒	0.84	“ death”“ martyr”“ dying”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L3N8190+1🕒, -0.03.

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 8190, dose -1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 3.27, top-1 agreement 0.30) 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.

Setting	KL divergence	Top-1 agreement	ΔNLL	Entropy	Steer lens
L3N8190+1🕒 shadow specimen t0-v0.1	1.139	0.57	1.376	1.53	“!”“！”“<\|im_end\|>”“"!”“ -”“!"”“ analysis”“ !”
L3N8190-1 t0-v0.1	3.268	0.30	3.816	2.51	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.