Layer 5 · Neuron 4550 · suppressed

L5N4550-1

Word quirks:

“ budget”“ appropriations”“ Budget”“ budgets”“ expenditures”“ expenditure”“ fiscal”“ appropriation”

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

Identity (according to the specimen itself)

The reply didn't hold together

<budget:expenditure:2019>
<budget:expenditure:2020>
<budget:expenditure:2021>
<budget:expenditure:2022>
<budget:expenditure:2023>
<budget:expenditure:2024>
<budget:expenditure:2025>
<budget:expenditure:2026>
<budget:expenditure:2027>
<budget:expenditure:2028

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. L7N6889+1🕒	0.96	“ budget”“ budgets”“ Budget”
2. L7N6264-1🕒	0.94	“ appropriations”“ fiscal”“ funding”
3. L6N8081-1💥	0.92	“ expenditures”“ budget”“ funding”
4. L19N2440+1🕒	0.90	“ budget”“ cost”“ Budget”
5. L5N5949-1💥	0.90	“ Budget”“ budget”“ Fiscal”
6. L8N7827+1🕒	0.90	“ budget”“ funds”“ budgets”
7. L9N8683-1🕒	0.89	“ spending”“<\|im_end\|>”“ expenditure”
8. The Contracting Officer✅ L8N1512+1	0.89	“ fiscal”“ budgets”“ budget”
9. L6N5771-1🕒	0.88	“ budget”“ Budget”“ budgets”
10. L10N9117-1🕒	0.88	“ budget”“ budgets”“ Budget”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L5N4550+1🕒, 0.14.

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 5, neuron 4550, dose -1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 3.62, top-1 agreement 0.28) 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
L5N4550+1🕒 shadow specimen t0-v0.1	1.019	0.59	1.169	1.88	“ reference”“ issue”“ company”“ question”“ referenced”“ request”“ resolution”“ info”
L5N4550-1 t0-v0.1	3.622	0.28	4.105	2.40	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.