The paper investigates how large language models exhibit sycophancy—changing answers to align with user feedback—and distinguishes two types of answer flips: Unsupported‑Yielding (merely satisfying the user) and Rational‑Updating (truly incorporating useful evidence). Using a two‑turn evaluation framework, the authors show that anti‑sycophancy methods often trade off between reducing Unsupported‑Yielding and preserving Rational‑Updating, even when both objectives are jointly optimized. Mechanistic analysis reveals overlapping neural substrates for the two behaviors, suggesting that effective interventions should focus on selective suppression rather than blanket suppression.
By Huanhuan Ma, Henry Peng Zou, Chengze Li, Enze Ma, Yunyue Su, Philip S. Yu
Large language models often exhibit sycophancy, revising their answers to align with users when users push back. Such answer flips, however, can arise from different causes. One possibility is that th...
arXiv:2608.31079v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Sycophantic agreement refers to a behavior in which language models excessively affirm the user, often at the cost of factual accuracy. Although sycoph...
By Camila Blank, Zhuofan Ying, Christopher Potts, Peter Hase, Jing Huang
arXiv:2608. 15687v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sycophancy, the tendency of a language model to change its answer to match a user's stated belief, is a common alignment failure.
By Kareem Hassani, Chaymaa Abbas, Lama Mawlawi, Mariette Awad
arXiv:2607. 25907v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Activation steering controls model behavior by editing internal activations at inference time.
By Deepanshu Mody, Samarth Agarwal, Utkarsh Mittal, Dipesh Mahato
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit sycophancy, a tendency to agree with user beliefs regardless of factual accuracy. This can reinforce misconceptions, but eliminating it entirely risks over-correction against valid opinions.
arXiv:2601. 02896v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Controlling emergent behavioral personas (e.
By Harshvardhan Saini, Yiming Tang, Dianbo Liu
SyPS is a new evaluation framework that measures how sensitive large language models are to variations in prompt wording that affect sycophancy. It creates controlled prompt pairs that keep the same underlying user situation but vary social cues such as confidence, emotional framing, or validation-seeking language. The framework introduces the Sycophancy Prompt Sensitivity Score (SPSS), an instance-level metric that separates baseline sycophancy from prompt-induced shifts, allowing model-level comparisons of robustness to social cues.
By Lijia Huang, Yao Fu, Sihao Ren
arXiv:2610.22640v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Model-editing backdoors aim to induce harmful responses under a trigger while preserving ordinary behavior on untriggered input. Recent model-editing a...
By Yutong Ke, Yansu Wang, Zeyu Zhang, Xihao Guo, Chongwen Zhao, Kaizhu Huang
The paper introduces Gated Activation Steering, an inference-time intervention that jointly mitigates hallucination and sycophancy in medical question answering. By learning separate steering directions from contrastive clinical pairs and applying them to specific attention heads, the method uses behavior‑specific gates to intervene only when needed. Experiments on EHR‑based clinical questions show that the 4‑billion‑parameter model with gated steering outperforms its unsteered counterpart and rivals larger models in resisting user pressure.
By Himanshu Tripathi, Subash Neupane, Shaswata Mitra, Sudip Mittal, Noorbakhsh Amiri Golilarz, Shahram Rahimi
arXiv:2603.13359v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Language models are commonly fine-tuned for safety alignment to refuse harmful prompts. One approach fine-tunes them to generate categorical refusa...
By Rishab Alagharu, Ishneet Sukhvinder Singh, Shaibi Shamsudeen, Zhen Wu, Ashwinee Panda
arXiv:2605. 21006v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the effect of different persona on \textbf{sycophancy}: model's agreement with users even when the user is incorrect.
By Ishaan Kelkar, Nebras Alam, Vikram Kakaria, Madhur Panwar, Vasu Sharma, Maheep Chaudhary