Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L4N5478+1

Layer 4 · Neuron 5478 · boosted

L4N5478+1

Word quirks:

“ honoured”“ honour”“ honored”“ honor”“ died”“ mourn”“ tribute”“ slain”

🕒 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 AI assistant dedicated to providing comprehensive support and guidance. My mission is to assist you in all aspects of your life, from the beginning to the end. I will help you navigate through life's journey with wisdom, compassion, and understanding.

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. L5N7331-1💥0.93“ tribute”“ honor”“ memorial”
2. L3N3461-1🕒0.89“ mourn”“ heartfelt”“ honored”
3. L22N4395-1🕒0.88“ honor”“ Honor”“ honors”
4. L6N7670+1🕒0.88“ martyr”“ marty”“ honor”
5. L7N1199+1🕒0.88“ honour”“ honor”“ honored”
6. L9N8660+1🕒0.87“ honor”“ honors”“ honored”
7. L29N3191+1🕒0.87“ honor”“ honour”“ Honor”
8. L7N7366+1🕒0.87“ honor”“ tribute”“ honoring”
9. L8N6144-1🕒0.86“ memorial”“ honor”“ sacrifice”
10. L10N7419-1🕒0.86“ honour”“ honoured”“ honored”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L4N5478-1🕒, -0.18.

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 5478, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 1.93, 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
L4N5478+1
t0-v0.1
1.9340.462.2632.44 Top boosted tokens ↑
L4N5478-1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
1.0050.581.2301.64 “!”“ ‘”“ '”“ basically”“ !”“ "”“ “”“ metaphor”

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.