arXiv AI

Agentic Scaffolding Amplifies Sycophantic Behavior in Large Language Models

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 8

Dissociating the Internal Representations of Sycophancy in LLMs

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 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
Jul 31

Ask don't tell: Reducing sycophancy in large language models

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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 13

Relational Positioning as a Measurable Risk Object: History-Carried Lock-in and Self-Confabulation in Multi-Turn Human-AI Dialogue

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.