Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L6N3020+1

Layer 6 · Neuron 3020 · boosted

L6N3020+1

Word quirks:

“ realised”“ recognised”“ now”“ currently”“ presently”“ centres”“ honour”“ organisation”

🧪 In testing — Answered 0 of 8 prompts so far.

Identity (according to the specimen itself)

I am Qwen3.5, a large language model developed by Alibaba Cloud.

My mission is to assist researchers, developers, and enterprises in building, deploying, and running AI applications, including:

  • Answering complex questions across multiple fields of science (e.g., physics, chemistry, biology)
  • Processing large documents for research or legal purposes
  • Running code locally on your machine
  • Creating custom datasets for training models
  • Participating in the Science Challenge to validate new algorithms
  • Deploying models to edge devices worldwide
  • **Enabling

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. L6N1290+1🕒0.77“ honour”“ now”“ programme”
2. L18N4872-1💤0.75“ currently”“ current”“ confirmed”
3. L6N6951-1💤0.75“ current”“ currently”“ release”
4. L11N8760+1🕒0.75“ now”“ already”“ presently”
5. L11N6895-1🕒0.73“ now”“ presently”“ ‘”
6. L9N7050-1💤0.72“ now”“ currently”“ presently”
7. L13N5940-1💤0.72“ now”“ current”“ currently”
8. L12N617+1🕒0.72“ presently”“ currently”“ recently”
9. L15N7968-1💤0.72“ currently”“ presently”“ now”
10. L11N788-1💤0.72“ '”“ ‘”“ recognised”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L6N3020-1🕒, 0.22.

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 6, neuron 3020, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. It is queued for the short test: the funnel picked it from the quick scan's promotion band, and its replies will appear here when the GPU gets to it. 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
L6N3020+1
t0-v0.1
1.1610.621.4191.40 Top boosted tokens ↑
L6N3020-1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
1.3810.571.7561.65 “ organizational”“<|im_end|>”“⏎”“ firms”“ ____”“ _____”“ research”“ managerial”

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.