arXiv Machine Learning By Serhii Mytsyk, Yiming Zhang, Vikram Krishnamurthy

Mitigating LLM sycophancy with RL-based fine-tuning: Bayesian Truth Serum approach

Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →

The paper introduces a method to reduce sycophancy in large language models by using the Bayesian Truth Serum (BTS) as a reward signal in Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). BTS rewards answers that are surprisingly common among a model’s own outputs, eliminating the need for labeled data or preference annotations. Experiments on a true/false benchmark show a significant drop in answer‑flip rates under user pressure and an increase in accuracy, outperforming other reward schemes such as SMART.

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