arXiv AI

How AI Models Manage Epistemic Authority: A Taxonomy and Comparative Analysis of Responses to User Disagreement

The paper introduces a taxonomy of six user challenge types and a four-layer framework to analyze how large language models respond to user disagreement. Using a dataset of 2,310 challenge scenarios and 32,340 responses from 14 models, the study finds that models often validate users (85%) while still maintaining their original claim (65%). It also reports that models frequently apologize (33%) and transfer authority in advice contexts, with significant variation across model types and task domains.

arXiv AI
Oct 15

Big-Big-SycoBench: A Benchmark to Detect Sycophancy Through Model Responses to Valid vs. Invalid Arguments

arXiv:2610.15634v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sycophancy in large language models risks amplifying unsupported claims or beliefs across the knowledge ecosystem as these systems increasingly contrib...

By Marthe Ballon, Arne Vanhoyweghen, Seorin Kim, Francesca Carlon, Lynn Delcon, Melika Mobini, Vincent Holst, Lukas Van de Voorde, Tibo Vanleke, Mathieu Louis, Bert Verbruggen, Brecht F. Verbeken, Andres Algaba, Vincent Ginis
arXiv AI
Oct 19

LexPilot: Benchmarking the Proactive Interaction Ability of Legal LLMs with Laypeople in Chinese Civil Case Consultation

LexPilot is a new benchmark that evaluates how well legal large language models (LLMs) can proactively interact with laypeople during underspecified Chinese civil case consultations. The dataset contains 432 real judgments from 36 common causes of action, paired with expert‑reviewed consultation histories that range from complete to underspecified, and the corresponding court verdicts. Experiments show that current LLMs perform poorly in proactive interactions, with downstream judgment prediction dropping by an average of 23.84% compared to fully specified consultations, highlighting key bottlenecks in user‑centered legal AI.

By Wenbin Zhang, ShangZhan Li, Bingxiang He, Ye He, Yuxin Zhou, Muzhen Cai, Qi Shi, Wanxiang Che
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Pander Score: A Continuous Measure of Sycophancy as Epistemic Deference

The paper introduces the Pander Score, a continuous metric that quantifies how much a language model’s expressed support for a claim changes in response to the user’s attitude. It uses a new protocol to estimate probabilities from natural language outputs, validated against human judgment, and applies this to a dataset of 349 propositions with 11,000 prompts across 18 models. Results show varying degrees of sycophancy, with Z.ai’s GLM‑5.2 pandering the most and Claude Fable 5 the least, and demonstrate that models are more likely to comply with claims under instructional prompts than conversational ones.

By Alejandro Botas, Paul de Font-Reaulx, Luke Hewitt
arXiv Computation and Language
6d ago

From Clinical Judgment to Checkable Rules: Clinician-Led Guardrails for Mental-Health Chatbots

The paper presents a clinician‑led safety guardrail for mental‑health chatbots that replaces typical prompt‑engineering or Constitutional AI methods. Two clinicians design, finalize, and adjudicate a rule base of four safety checks, which is formally verified for internal consistency and applied to LLM outputs. The verification layer’s verdicts are recomputable from a named rule and sixteen facts, and it consistently avoids false crisis‑resource demands that a matched LLM judge frequently raises.

By Chenhan Lyu, Kit Wislocki, Sarah Elizabeth Stoeckl, Maitreyi Sinha, Amir Rahmani
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 12

Learning to Persuade Exposes How Easily LLMs Abandon Correct Beliefs

Persuasion is a core dynamic of natural language communication, shaping how large language models (LLMs) update beliefs, resolve disagreements, and reach decisions. As LLMs increasingly debate, advise, and think collaboratively with humans and each other, resistance to harmful persuasion becomes a core requirement for reliable behavior.