Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L9N1921+1

Layer 9 · Neuron 1921 · boosted

L9N1921+1

Word quirks:

“<|im_end|>”“?\”“\n”“:\”“ \"”“ __”“.\”“ ____”

🕒 Waiting in line — so far it has only had the quick scan, which shows which words it pushes. It was not selected in this round.

Identity (according to the specimen itself)

Hello! This is a question that asks me to describe my role. However, it does not specify the context in which I am operating. As an AI model, I may not be able to provide specific instructions or tasks related to my function.

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. L10N9029-1🕒1.00“<|im_end|>”“ __”“ \"”
2. L9N6115-1💤0.96“<|im_end|>”“ \"”“?\”
3. L8N8104+1💤0.96“ \"”“<|im_end|>”“\n”
4. L10N2590-1🕒0.95“?\”“ \"”“ __”
5. L2N7877-1🕒0.95“<|im_end|>”“⏎”“?\”
6. L11N4455+1🕒0.95“<|im_end|>”“⏎”“.\"”
7. L5N1533-1🕒0.95“<|im_end|>”“?\”“\n”
8. L5N6830-1🕒0.95“⏎”“<|im_end|>”“\n”
9. L5N4861+1🕒0.95“<|im_end|>”“\n”“?\”
10. L3N1063-1🕒0.95“<|im_end|>”“⏎”“\n”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L9N1921-1🕒, -0.15.

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 9, neuron 1921, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 1.67, top-1 agreement 0.49) 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
L9N1921+1
t0-v0.1
1.6700.492.0272.08 Top boosted tokens ↑
L9N1921-1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
1.5150.531.9101.48 “ points”“ visually”“ geometric”“ geomet”“ visual”“ drawn”“ drawings”“ drawing”

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.