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:2607. 25907v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Activation steering controls model behavior by editing internal activations at inference time.
Large language models often align with users' beliefs at the expense of factual accuracy, a behavior known as sycophancy. Prior mechanistic studies largely treat sycophancy as a single behavioral dimension that can be uniformly amplified or suppressed.
arXiv:2606. 08454v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Activation steering provides a lightweight inference-time mechanism for controlling large language models (LLMs) by modifying their internal activation vectors toward desired behaviors.
arXiv:2606. 15092v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Activation steering has emerged as a key methodology for controlling the behavior of large language models (LLMs).
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.
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.
arXiv:2607. 25270v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Activation steering controls language models by adding vectors or features to hidden states at inference time, but the upstream source of these steering signals is often treated as a secondary detail.
arXiv:2607. 19364v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Activation steering offers a lightweight alternative to fine-tuning for behavioral control of large language models, but SAE-based steering methods often rely on learned steering objectives or single-criterion feature selection.
arXiv:2607. 05615v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Activation steering via sparse autoencoders (SAEs) enables behavioral control of large language models without task-specific fine-tuning, but standard methods apply the steering signal at every generated token, incurring constant per-token perturbation that risks degrading fluency.
arXiv:2602. 00945v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLMs are multilingual by training, yet their lingua franca is often English, reflecting English language dominance in pretraining.
arXiv:2605. 17231v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Activation steering has emerged as a lightweight approach for modifying language model behavior without parameter updates, yet existing methods remain brittle: unstable across layers and prone to disturbing behavior unrelated to the target concept.
arXiv:2606. 08682v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Activation steering has emerged as a popular inference-time technique for modulating the behavior of large language models (LLMs).