Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L4N1854-1

Layer 4 · Neuron 1854 · suppressed

L4N1854-1

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)

我是 Qwen3,是阿里巴巴集团旗下的通义实验室所训练的语言模型。我的使命是让 AI 更有温度,让科技更有文化。我致力于提供高质量、高准确率的回答,并尽可能减少用户的困惑和焦虑。通过我的存在,我希望能够帮助用户更好地理解和解决问题,同时也能促进人类对科技的认知和尊重。

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. L3N3132+1💤0.96“ “”“ ‘”“ **“”
2. L4N5283+1🕒0.96“ **“”“(”““”
3. L4N2371-1🕒0.96“ ‘”“‘”““”
4. L4N3881+1🕒0.95“ ‘”“ “”“ **“”
5. L10N4398-1💤0.95“ **“”“ ‘”“:**”
6. L5N4782-1💤0.95““”“ “”“ ‘”
7. L10N8956+1🕒0.95“ **“”“ “”“:“”
8. L6N2234-1💤0.94“ “”“ ‘”“(”
9. L6N6347-1💤0.94“(”“ ‘”“ **“”
10. L9N675+1💤0.94““”“ “”“ **“”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L4N1854+1🕒, 0.54.

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 4, neuron 1854, dose -1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.98, top-1 agreement 0.62) 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
L4N1854+1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
2.1390.412.4442.36 “<|im_end|>”“⏎”“...””“ ‘”“⏎ ⏎”“?\”“ ?”“ ””
L4N1854-1
t0-v0.1
0.9780.621.2121.64 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.