arXiv AI By Ritvij Sharma, Russell Dlugosz, Ryan Zhou, Maheep Chaudhary

Defense-in-Depth for LLMs: Evaluating Memory Gates Against Activation-Induced and Memory-Induced Sycophancy

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The paper presents a defense‑in‑depth framework for large language models that separates internal activation steering from external memory handling to combat sycophancy. It evaluates four open‑weight models on a new MemSyco‑Bench dataset, testing five memory‑defense configurations—including a Router Gate that selectively rewrites, keeps, or drops memories—and measures sycophancy and accuracy across 1,550 items. Results show that selective Router Gate filtering preserves more accuracy than complete memory removal, while inverse steering slightly reduces sycophancy but is not statistically significant.

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