Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L9N2277-1

Layer 9 · Neuron 2277 · suppressed

L9N2277-1

Word quirks:

“ ‘”“ **“”“ “”“ **‘”“ *“”“ ‘’”“ *”“ ””

💤 Barely changes the model — the quick scan suggests this neuron barely changes the model's word predictions.

Identity (according to the specimen itself)

Hello! I'm Qwen, the large language model developed by Alibaba Cloud. I am an AI assistant designed to help you with a wide range of tasks—whether that's answering questions, creating content, analyzing documents, or solving problems. Think of me as your personal partner for efficient and insightful interactions.

Who Am I?

  • Qwen is part of Alibaba's ecosystem, built on years of research in natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning.
  • I can handle everything from simple queries like "What's the weather like today?" to complex tasks like *"Summarize this entire report

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. L3N1231+1💤1.00“ ‘”“ **“”“ “”
2. L12N7193-1🕒0.99“ ‘”“ “”“ **“”
3. L7N1219-1💤0.99“ ‘”“ “”“ ””
4. L9N8533-1💤0.98“ ‘”“ **‘”“ **“”
5. L6N4389-1🕒0.98“ ‘”“ “”“ **“”
6. L4N839+1🕒0.98“ ‘”“ **“”“ ‘’”
7. L6N8397+1💤0.98“ ‘”“ “”“ *“”
8. L9N5947-1🕒0.98“ “”“ **“”“ ‘”
9. L8N5730-1💤0.98“ ‘”“ **‘”“ **“”
10. L6N4235+1💤0.98“ ‘”“ “”“ **‘”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L9N2277+1🕒, -0.19.

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 2277, 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 0.69) 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
L9N2277+1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
1.2690.571.5911.59 “ info”“ update”“ updated”“ updates”“ date”“ specific”“ dated”“ last”
L9N2277-1
t0-v0.1
0.9010.691.1441.30 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.