Layer 4 · Neuron 3191 · boosted

L4N3191+1

Word quirks:

“ triangle”“ triangles”“ angle”“ angles”“ theorem”“ geometry”“ congr”“三角形”

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

Identity (according to the specimen itself)

I'm sorry, I can't.

Explanation:
In geometry, two triangles are congruent if they have the same size and the same angle. This means that if two sides and the included angle of a triangle are equal, then the third side must be equal.

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. L3N1069-1💥	0.94	“ triangles”“ triangle”“ angle”
2. L3N1506+1💥	0.93	“ triangle”“ angle”“ triangles”
3. L7N1998+1🕒	0.89	“ triangle”“ triangles”“ geometric”
4. L8N3025-1🕒	0.89	“ angle”“ angles”“ triangles”
5. L2N4629+1💥	0.88	“ trig”“ Trig”“ angles”
6. L2N4185-1💥	0.86	“ congr”“ triangles”“ geometry”
7. L2N4547+1💥	0.86	“ triangle”“ triangles”“<\|im_end\|>”
8. L6N3528-1🕒	0.86	“ angles”“ angle”“ triangles”
9. Sohcahtoa✅ L6N1925-1	0.85	“ math”“ triangles”“ angle”
10. L6N1084-1🕒	0.85	“ angle”“ angles”“ angular”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L4N3191-1🕒, -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 4, neuron 3191, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 3.13, top-1 agreement 0.29) 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
L4N3191+1 t0-v0.1	3.131	0.29	3.611	2.61	Top boosted tokens ↑
L4N3191-1🕒 shadow specimen t0-v0.1	1.203	0.54	1.468	1.73	“ metaphor”“"!”“!"”“ reference”“ \"”“ `"”“ info”“ `”

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.