arXiv Machine Learning

TD-DPO: Difference-Aware Preference Optimization for Mitigating Sycophancy in Clinical Autism Intervention Dialogue

arXiv:2607. 18304v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The sycophancy of large language models can increase the safety risk in intervention dialogue for autistic children.

arXiv AI
2d ago

SyPS: Measuring Sycophancy Prompt Sensitivity in Large Language Models

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 AI
2d ago

Gated Activation Steering for Reducing Sycophancy & Hallucination in Medical Question Answering

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