The paper investigates how language models decide between contextual information and their internal memory when the two conflict. By estimating "authority directions" from agreement prompts and swapping these directions between matched prompts, the authors show that such interventions can reproduce 30–68% of the shift in source choice across Qwen, Llama, and OLMo models. Cross‑task experiments reveal that authority directions learned on one task transfer only modestly (≈9%) to another, indicating that authority computations are largely task‑specific.
By Benjamin Shih, John Winnicki, Arianna Cao
arXiv:2607. 07003v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently exhibit sycophancy, where they agree with a user's statement even when incorrect.
By Anthony Baez, Sheer Karny, Pat Pataranutaporn
arXiv:2608. 08026v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate how social authority (SA) signals interact with severity-based prioritization in large language models, operationalizing each axis as a model-elicited baseline -- the triage hierarchy and the SA hierarchy.
By Eunna Lee
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:2609.37616v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Language models tend to agree with whatever a user asserts, and post-training increasingly targets this sycophancy so that models evaluate claims on th...
By Abhinav Rajeev Kumar (Lossfunk), Paras Chopra (Lossfunk)
Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently exhibit sycophancy, where they agree with a user's statement even when incorrect. While sycophancy is often treated as a single defined behavior, it can manifest in substantially distinct ways and circumstances, raising the question of whether this multi-faceted nature is reflected in its internal mechanisms.
arXiv:2606. 05403v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models increasingly act as epistemic proxies, synthesizing evidence from multiple sources to inform decisions.
By Rohan N. Pradhan, Steve Goley
arXiv:2606. 01637v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models are increasingly used in multi-agent systems, where they see and respond to other agents' answers.
By Jiaming Qu, Lucheng fu, Yibo Hu
arXiv:2604.03058v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: LLMs can be socially sycophantic, affirming users when they ask questions like "am I in the wrong?" rather than providing genuine assessment....
By Myra Cheng, Isabel Sieh, Humishka Zope, Sunny Yu, Lujain Ibrahim, Aryaman Arora, Jared Moore, Desmond Ong, Dan Jurafsky, Diyi Yang
arXiv:2609.35822v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Sycophantic agreement in language models refers to the tendency to overly affirm a user's stated beliefs or preferences, often at the expense of fact...
By Sixing Chen, Zhuofan Josh Ying, Logan Riggs Smith, Jeremy Wertheimer, Natalie Shapira
arXiv:2603.22161v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Metacognition -- assessing the quality of one's own cognitive performance -- guides adaptive behavior across species. Substantial research demonstr...
By Dharshan Kumaran, Nathaniel Daw, Simon Osindero, Petar Veli\v{c}kovi\'c, Viorica Patraucean
arXiv:2408. 05568v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit potentially harmful biases that reinforce culturally embedded stereotypes, influence moral judgments, or amplify positive evaluations of majority groups.
By Florian Scholten, Tobias R. Rebholz, Mandy H\"utter