Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L7N8162-1

Layer 7 · Neuron 8162 · suppressed

L7N8162-1

Word quirks:

“ questions”“ question”“ personnel”“ usually”“ administrative”“ your”“ education”“ staffing”

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

Identity (according to the specimen itself)

Hello! I am an artificial intelligence model. My "mission" is to provide high-quality, efficient, and inclusive assistance to help users solve problems and achieve their goals.

As for who I am:

  • I am a large language model, trained on vast amounts of data to understand and generate human-like text.
  • My core function is to provide objective, accurate, and professional information services.
  • My goal is to help everyone grow together through learning and exchange.

If you are asking these questions, it seems you may be looking for a conversation with me. In that case,

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. L7N5975-1💤0.72“ education”“ question”“ educational”
2. L9N4976+1💤0.68“ question”“ questions”“ typical”
3. L6N7397-1🕒0.65“ staffing”“ personnel”“ staff”
4. L10N1964-1🕒0.65“ question”“ questions”“ typical”
5. L7N8523-1💤0.64“ education”“ sometimes”“ educational”
6. L2N8417+1💥0.64“ personnel”“<|im_end|>”“ Personnel”
7. L4N7956+1🕒0.63“ organisation”“ management”“ personnel”
8. L8N9116+1🕒0.63“ HR”“ employee”“ employees”
9. L2N7426-1💥0.63“ staff”“<|im_end|>”“ personnel”
10. L10N6666+1🕒0.63“ questions”“ question”“ generally”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L7N8162+1🕒, 0.25.

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 8162, 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
L7N8162+1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
2.2210.462.6732.11 “ kids”“ parents”“ children”“kids”“ mom”“ allowance”“ Kids”“ money”
L7N8162-1
t0-v0.1
1.2220.611.4151.40 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.