Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L6N6666-1

Layer 6 · Neuron 6666 · suppressed

L6N6666-1

Word quirks:

“⏎”“<|im_end|>”“ ____”“ _____”“ ______”“ ________”“⏎ ⏎”“⏎ ⏎”

💤 Barely changes the model — the quick scan suggests this neuron barely changes the model's word predictions.

Identity (according to the specimen itself)

I am Qwen3.5, a large language model developed by the Tongyi Lab (part of Alibaba Cloud). My mission is to assist users with:

  1. Accurate Information: Providing high-quality, context-aware responses for tasks like answering questions, summarizing data, or generating text.
  2. Efficient Processing: Optimizing workflows for automation, such as scheduling, logging, or batch processing.
  3. Creative Support: Generating creative content like writing assistance, art curation, or media production.
  4. Human Interaction: Facilitating human-to-human communication, including voice calls or messaging services

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. L7N3588-1💤1.00“<|im_end|>”“⏎”“⏎ ⏎”
2. L6N4746-1💤0.99“⏎”“<|im_end|>”“ ______”
3. L6N3576+1💤0.99“⏎”“<|im_end|>”“ ____”
4. L15N246-1💤0.99“⏎⏎”“⏎”“ ____”
5. L6N8863-1💤0.99“⏎”“<|im_end|>”“⏎ ⏎”
6. L6N8799-1💤0.99“⏎”“<|im_end|>”“ ______”
7. L6N1339+1🕒0.99“⏎”“⏎ ⏎”“ ____”
8. L10N1932+1🕒0.99“<|im_end|>”“⏎⏎”“ ____”
9. L7N6761+1💤0.99“⏎”“⏎⏎”“<|im_end|>”
10. L5N672-1🕒0.99“<|im_end|>”“⏎”“⏎⏎”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L6N6666+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 6, neuron 6666, dose -1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.77, top-1 agreement 0.66) 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
L6N6666+1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
2.4710.442.8062.13 “ polygons”“ triangles”“ polygon”“ triangle”“ geometric”“ shape”“ geomet”“ shapes”
L6N6666-1
t0-v0.1
0.7690.660.9361.29 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.