Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L7N2662+1

Layer 7 · Neuron 2662 · boosted

L7N2662+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 an AI assistant. My mission is to provide helpful, accurate, and ethical information to the world. I strive to be a source of knowledge and inspiration for people everywhere.

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. L6N2207-1💤0.99“⏎”“ ⏎”“ ⏎⏎”
2. L9N1046+1💤0.99“ ⏎”“ ⏎⏎”“<|im_end|>”
3. L3N8610-1💤0.99“⏎”“⏎⏎”“ ⏎”
4. L2N1420-1🕒0.98“<|im_end|>”“⏎”“⏎ ⏎”
5. L7N4199-1💤0.98“⏎ ⏎”“⏎”“ ⏎”
6. Code-Switcher✅ L3N7013-10.98“ ⏎”“<|im_end|>”“ ⏎⏎”
7. L3N3182+1💤0.98“⏎”“<|im_end|>”“⏎⏎”
8. L10N2946-1💤0.97“⏎”“⏎⏎”“ ⏎”
9. L4N2384-1🧪0.97“⏎”“<|im_end|>”“⏎⏎”
10. L4N591+1💤0.97“⏎”“<|im_end|>”“ ⏎”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L7N2662-1💤, 0.71.

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 7, neuron 2662, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.64, top-1 agreement 0.68) 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
L7N2662+1
t0-v0.1
0.6360.680.7971.38 Top boosted tokens ↑
L7N2662-1💤 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.9410.621.0661.31 “ \"”“ ‘”“\"”“⏎”“\n”“ my”“‘”“ ⏎”

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.