Layer 8 · Neuron 6358 · boosted

L8N6358+1

Word quirks:

“ my”“ providing”“ reprint”“ --”“ myself”“ https”“ nicely”“ –”

💤 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, a large language model developed by Alibaba Cloud. My mission is to provide accurate and up-to-date information on the latest advancements in natural language processing, with a focus on the field of computer vision. I aim to serve as a comprehensive resource for researchers, practitioners, and students interested in this area.

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. L11N378-1💤	0.74	“ my”“ myself”“ --”
2. L10N9202-1🕒	0.71	“ myself”“ --”“ my”
3. L10N1427-1💤	0.71	“ --”“ my”“ reflected”
4. L8N4054+1💤	0.69	“ my”“ myself”“ ⏎”
5. L10N8197-1🕒	0.69	“ my”“ myself”“ -”
6. L9N2843-1💤	0.68	“ my”“ now”“ --”
7. L8N8570-1🕒	0.68	“ my”“ My”“ myself”
8. L8N3989+1💤	0.68	“ my”“⏎”“ myself”
9. L9N8342-1🕒	0.68	“ my”“ ⏎”“ usual”
10. L7N7867+1💤	0.68	“ my”“ our”“ —”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L8N6358-1🕒, 0.21.

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 6358, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.90, top-1 agreement 0.60) 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
L8N6358+1 t0-v0.1	0.903	0.60	1.152	1.58	Top boosted tokens ↑
L8N6358-1🕒 shadow specimen t0-v0.1	1.364	0.61	1.496	1.33	“ words”“ without”“ acknowledgment”“ verbal”“ language”“ acknowledgement”“ communication”“ messages”

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.