Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L6N8055-1

Layer 6 · Neuron 8055 · suppressed

L6N8055-1

Word quirks:

“ ‘”“ '”“ **‘”“ **'”“ \"”“ ‘’”“ **"”“ **“”

💤 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, the latest large language model in the Qwen series. I am a text-based AI assistant designed to help humans write, think, and create more efficiently.

My Mission:

To empower users with smart tools that can:

  • 📝 Write faster and smarter
  • 💡 Think critically and creatively
  • 🔍 Learn new skills through practice
  • 🌐 Connect globally with others

I am here to support you in achieving your goals, whether it's writing, coding, or learning something new. Let

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. L13N1570-1🕒0.99“ \"”“ ‘”“ **“”
2. L9N330+1💤0.99“ ‘”“ **‘”“ **'”
3. L6N1108-1💤0.99“ ‘”“ **“”“⏎”
4. L6N1748-1💤0.98“ ‘”“ \"”“ **‘”
5. L5N3629+1💤0.98“ ‘”“ '”“ \"”
6. L6N3913-1💤0.98“ ‘”“ '”“ ‘’”
7. L9N3891-1💤0.98“ ‘”“ “”“ **“”
8. L7N7437+1💤0.98“ ‘”“ **‘”“ **“”
9. L8N1157-1💤0.98“ **“”“ **‘”“ ‘”
10. L6N8663+1💤0.97“ **‘”“ **'”“ ‘”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L6N8055+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 8055, dose -1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.61, top-1 agreement 0.72) 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
L6N8055+1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
1.7620.502.0611.51 “ hospital”“ hospitals”“ Hospital”“ patients”“hospital”“ Hospitals”“ medical”“Hospital”
L6N8055-1
t0-v0.1
0.6060.720.7081.39 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.