Layer 8 · Neuron 4349 · boosted

L8N4349+1

Word quirks:

“ now”“⏎”“ **“”“ my”“ above”“ usually”“ currently”“ “”

💤 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 information, answer questions, and assist with tasks. My mission is to be helpful, accurate, and capable of supporting users in their needs. I aim to deliver clear, concise, and reliable responses while ensuring a positive user experience.

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

Specimen	Similarity	Word quirks
1. L11N7563-1🕒	0.85	“ currently”“ now”“ “”
2. The Stranger✅ L7N4603+1	0.85	“ '”“ now”“ my”
3. L6N4203+1💤	0.79	“ now”“ “”“ usual”
4. L8N5979-1💤	0.78	“ “”“ now”“ "”
5. L9N2360-1💤	0.77	“ ⏎”“ today”“ this”
6. L14N5609+1🕒	0.77	“ “”“ presently”“ nearer”
7. L11N8367+1💤	0.77	“ now”“⏎”“⏎⏎”
8. L15N6009+1💤	0.77	“ now”“ “”“ currently”
9. L15N7201+1💤	0.77	“ now”“ newly”“ **“”
10. L7N3070-1🕒	0.75	“ now”“ here”“ NOW”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L8N4349-1🕒, 0.50.

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 8, neuron 4349, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.68, top-1 agreement 0.70) 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.

Setting	KL divergence	Top-1 agreement	ΔNLL	Entropy	Steer lens
L8N4349+1 t0-v0.1	0.679	0.70	0.879	1.33	Top boosted tokens ↑
L8N4349-1🕒 shadow specimen t0-v0.1	2.028	0.42	2.404	1.92	“ ____”“ now”“ ‘”“ ””“ __”“ this”“ --”“<\|im_end\|>”

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.