Layer 8 · Neuron 8862 · boosted

L8N8862+1

Word quirks:

“ requests”“ request”“ requesting”“ reply”“ comment”“ separately”“ requested”“ response”

💤 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, an advanced large language model. My mission is to provide high-quality, accurate, and helpful responses to your inquiries. I aim to assist you with clarity and efficiency while ensuring the content remains professional and relevant.

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. L7N7669+1🕒	0.94	“ requests”“ request”“ requesting”
2. L6N3835-1🕒	0.91	“ response”“ requesting”“ request”
3. L8N7885-1🕒	0.90	“ requests”“ request”“ Requests”
4. L15N6407-1💤	0.90	“ request”“⏎”“ requested”
5. L11N7316-1🕒	0.90	“ requests”“ requested”“ request”
6. L9N5976-1🕒	0.90	“ requests”“ request”“ response”
7. L5N7842+1🕒	0.90	“ request”“ question”“ response”
8. L9N4163-1🕒	0.89	“ request”“ requests”“ --”
9. L9N529-1💤	0.89	“ request”“ response”“ requesting”
10. L5N6028+1💥	0.89	“ reply”“ asking”“ requesting”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L8N8862-1🕒, 0.10.

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 8862, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.94, top-1 agreement 0.66) 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
L8N8862+1 t0-v0.1	0.943	0.66	1.140	1.32	Top boosted tokens ↑
L8N8862-1🕒 shadow specimen t0-v0.1	1.437	0.54	1.771	1.78	“ special”“ info”“⏎”“ specialty”“ ONLY”“ ____”“ description”“ specified”

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.