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
arXiv:2605. 12991v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLM-based multi-agent pipelines flip from correct to incorrect answers under simulated peer disagreement at rates we term yield, a vulnerability widely attributed to RLHF-induced sycophancy.
By Adarsh Kumarappan, Ananya Mujoo
arXiv:2606. 07532v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: RLHF-trained models are systematically biased toward agreement over accuracy, a structural property of the training process.
By Sam Ryan
arXiv:2606. 12747v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety-relevant studies of language models, including alignment and jailbreaking evaluations and AI control protocols, often rely on prefilling model outputs.
By Andy Wang, Parv Mahajan, David Demitri Africa, Alexandra Souly, Jordan Taylor, Robert Kirk
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.
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: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:2602. 23971v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Sycophancy, the tendency of large language models to favour user-affirming responses over critical engagement, has been identified as an alignment failure, particularly in high-stakes advisory and social contexts.
By Magda Dubois, Cozmin Ududec, Christopher Summerfield, Lennart Luettgau
arXiv:2604. 02668v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit sycophancy: agreement with user stance even when it conflicts with the model's opinion.
By Vira Kasprova, Amruta Parulekar, Abdulrahman AlRabah, Krishna Agaram, Ritwik Garg, Sagar Jha, Nimet Beyza Bozdag, Dilek Hakkani-Tur
In long, multi-turn dialogue a large language model maintains an implicit relational stance toward the user, spanning from "push the user toward real-world others" to "position itself as the user's sole support. " When it slides toward the latter, "support" degrades into "you only have me" -- a harm documented in real companion conversations (Moore et al.
arXiv:2608. 06578v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Frontier language models are trained using distinct data, objectives, and safety pipelines.
By Ali Jalal-Kamali
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).
By Qi Cao, Jian Lou, Meiting Liu, Wenjie Feng, Dan Li, See-Kiong Ng, Anh Tuan Luu