Group alignment adapts a language model to a demographic group to produce responses that reflect the group's opinions, values, and preferences. Sycophancy, a well-documented by-product of alignment, causes the model to over-agree with the user regardless of factual and objective information.
arXiv:2608.29198v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly encourage users to disclose personal profiles for tailored assistance, measuring their political alignment...
Warning: This paper studies stereotypes and biases, and contains potentially disturbing examples, used for illustration purposes only. Our findings should not be interpreted as an argument against alignment.
arXiv:2501. 02211v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) reproduce homogeneity bias -- the tendency to portray marginalized groups as more internally similar than dominant groups -- but whether this bias generalizes across models, is stable under different inference settings, or depends on how group identity is signaled remains unstudied.
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: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...
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.
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...
The paper introduces Demographic Pluralism, an inference-time framework that estimates population-level opinion distributions without requiring training data or task-specific fine-tuning. It generates multiple perspectives within demographically grounded groups and, across four model backbones on GlobalOpinionQA and VITAL, reduces Jensen-Shannon distance by 8.4%–26.4% compared to Modular Pluralism. The study finds that equal weighting of group perspectives yields the best overall performance, while weighted aggregation performs worse due to increased group-level error.
The paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) possess intrinsic value systems and how to quantify and align them. By projecting responses from 106 LLMs and 95,000 human survey profiles into a shared sociological space, the authors confirm that LLMs do have values, though these values form a concentrated, idealized core rather than mirroring human diversity. They introduce the Prior-Environment-Cognition (PEC) framework to mathematically define value expression and propose an adaptive Alignment Prescription that identifies minimal interventions—ranging from prompts to targeted parameter updates—to steer LLM values efficiently without harming general performance.
arXiv:2509.21305v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit sycophantic behaviors -- such as excessive agreement with or flattery of the user -- but it is unclear w...
arXiv:2607. 27232v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly shaping how we consume information and form our worldview.
The paper examines how large language models (LLMs) respond to different demographic cues—such as names—when users seek advice, focusing on race and gender in a U.S. context. It finds that using different cues for the same group leads to only partially overlapping changes in model responses, producing inconsistent conclusions about personalization and unstable bias metrics. The authors argue that LLMs react to linguistic signals tied to cues rather than to stable demographic categories, and they call for evaluations that use multiple cues and consider underlying mechanisms.