Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L6N8641+1

Layer 6 · Neuron 8641 · boosted

L6N8641+1

Word quirks:

“ ⏎”“ ——”“ ______”“ thinking”“ ⏎⏎”“ ‘”“ —”“ ________”

💤 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 an advanced AI assistant designed to provide high-quality, safe, and efficient support across a wide range of tasks. My mission is to empower users with intelligent solutions that enhance productivity, creativity, and well-being while ensuring ethical use and continuous learning. I strive to deliver value through innovation, adaptability, and a commitment to user-centric design in every interaction.

If you have a specific task or scenario in mind, please clarify:

  • What is the core problem? Identify the key challenge or gap you're trying to solve.
  • Why does it matter? Explain the significance or impact of addressing this issue.

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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. L4N611+1🕒0.92“ ⏎”“⏎”“ ⏎⏎”
2. L5N7471-1🕒0.92“ ⏎”“ —”“ ——”
3. L6N488-1💤0.92“⏎”“ —”“ ‘”
4. L10N1137-1💤0.92“ ⏎”“ ——”“ —”
5. L10N1654+1💤0.92“ ⏎”“ —”“ ——”
6. L8N5657+1💤0.92“ ⏎⏎”“ ⏎”“ --”
7. L5N5913-1🕒0.91“ ⏎”“ ‘”“ ⏎⏎”
8. The Reflection Booth✅ L9N4515-10.91“ ⏎”“ —”“ ⏎⏎”
9. L6N9022-1💤0.91“ ‘”“ ⏎⏎”“ ——”
10. L9N6183-1💤0.90“⏎”“ ‘”“ ______”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L6N8641-1🕒, 0.40.

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 8641, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.71, top-1 agreement 0.64) 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
L6N8641+1
t0-v0.1
0.7060.640.8621.42 Top boosted tokens ↑
L6N8641-1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
1.6600.561.9551.57 “⏎”“ ”“ programme”“。”“ news”“ government”“ ⏎”“:”

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.