Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L4N4308+1

Layer 4 · Neuron 4308 · boosted

L4N4308+1

Word quirks:

“ optimizer”“ evaluation”“ optimization”“ parameter”“ dataset”“ SVM”“ parameters”“ optimized”

🕒 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 expert in person re-identification and evaluation. My mission is designed to optimize the performance of the system by balancing the trade-offs between different features. The goal is to achieve a high accuracy while maintaining a low computational cost.

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. L8N7150+1🕒0.88“ optimized”“ optimizations”“ optimizer”
2. L5N3799-1🕒0.84“ parameter”“ parameters”“ Bayesian”
3. L11N3785+1🕒0.83“ optimal”“ optimum”“ parameters”
4. L5N5346-1💥0.79“ optimization”“ optimizer”“ optimizing”
5. L8N2717-1🕒0.78“ optimization”“ optimizer”“ optimizations”
6. L4N4507-1🕒0.78“ optimizer”“ optimization”“ optim”
7. L7N5040+1🕒0.78“ optimization”“ optimizer”“ optim”
8. L1N8751+1💥0.78“ optimization”“ parameter”“ analysis”
9. L6N7678+1🕒0.78“ optimization”“ optimized”“ optimize”
10. L9N3651+1🕒0.77“ optimization”“ optimizations”“ optim”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L4N4308-1💤, 0.17.

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 4308, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 2.30, top-1 agreement 0.46) 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
L4N4308+1
t0-v0.1
2.3040.462.6742.21 Top boosted tokens ↑
L4N4308-1💤 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.8420.631.0651.55 “ '”“ generated”“ image”“ -”“ my”“ response”“ generating”“ reason”

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.