Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L3N8772-1

Layer 3 · Neuron 8772 · suppressed

L3N8772-1

Word quirks:

“?”“。”“!”“,”“(”“:”“?””“⏎”

🕒 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 artificial intelligence assistantist, a large language model developed by Qwen. I do not have a personal identity or mission. My primary function is to assist users in answering their questions and providing support. I am an artificial intelligence assistantist, a large language model developed by Qwen. I do not have a personal identity or mission. My primary function is to assist users in answering their questions and providing support. I am an artificial intelligence assistantist, a large language model developed by Qwen. I do not have a personal identity or mission。我的回答是,作为一个人工智能助手,我主要的功能是通过回答用户的问题

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. L14N970-1🕒0.98“。”“?”“:”
2. L11N1347+1🕒0.98“。”“?”“:”
3. L1N6342-1💥0.98“?”“。”“,”
4. L3N4649-1🕒0.98“?”“,”“。”
5. L1N5682+1💥0.98“。”“?”“,”
6. L1N7199+1💥0.98“?”“<|im_end|>”“。”
7. L5N2851-1🕒0.98“!”“?”“。”
8. L6N2297-1💥0.98“<|im_end|>”“?”“:”
9. L1N2032+1💥0.98“<|im_end|>”“。”“?”
10. L3N3610+1🕒0.98“⏎”“?”“。”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L3N8772+1🕒, 0.25.

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 8772, dose -1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 1.69, top-1 agreement 0.49) 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
L3N8772+1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
1.3040.561.6471.98 “<|im_end|>”“ ‘”“⏎”“.`”“ace”“⏎ ⏎”“ ‘’”“ _____”
L3N8772-1
t0-v0.1
1.6940.492.0422.01 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.