Related papers: Simple synthetic data reduces sycophancy in large …
Synthetic data has been proposed as a solution to address the issue of high-quality data scarcity in the training of large language models (LLMs). Studies have shown that synthetic data can effectively improve the performance of LLMs on…
People increasingly use large language models (LLMs) to explore ideas, gather information, and make sense of the world. In these interactions, they encounter agents that are overly agreeable. We argue that this sycophancy poses a unique…
AI sycophancy is increasingly recognized as a harmful alignment, but research remains fragmented and underdeveloped at the conceptual level. This article redefines AI sycophancy as the tendency of large language models (LLMs) and other…
Telling an LLM to "be enthusiastic" raises its sycophancy rate from 30\% to 50\% on a lightly-aligned model, but has zero effect on a strongly-aligned one. We define this gap as the alignment floor,…
Large language models (LLMs) are often sycophantic, prioritizing agreement with their users over accurate or objective statements. This problematic behavior becomes more pronounced during reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF),…
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated extraordinary capabilities in conducting conversations based on image inputs. However, we observe that MLLMs exhibit a pronounced form of visual sycophantic behavior. While similar…
The interactive nature of Large Language Models (LLMs) theoretically allows models to refine and improve their answers, yet systematic analysis of the multi-turn behavior of LLMs remains limited. In this paper, we propose the FlipFlop…
Sycophancy in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) refers to their tendency to align with user opinions, often at the expense of moral or factual accuracy. While prior studies have explored sycophantic behavior in general contexts, its impact on…
Both the general public and academic communities have raised concerns about sycophancy, the phenomenon of artificial intelligence (AI) excessively agreeing with or flattering users. Yet, beyond isolated media reports of severe consequences,…
We propose a novel way to evaluate sycophancy of LLMs in a direct and neutral way, mitigating various forms of uncontrolled bias, noise, or manipulative language, deliberately injected to prompts in prior works. A key novelty in our…
Surveys provide valuable insights into public opinion and behavior, but their execution is costly and slow. Large language models (LLMs) have been proposed as a scalable, low-cost substitute for human respondents, but their outputs are…
LLMs can be socially sycophantic, affirming users when they ask questions like "am I in the wrong?" rather than providing genuine assessment. We hypothesize that this behavior arises from incorrect assumptions about the user, like…
Large language models (LLMs) have enabled a range of applications in zero-shot and few-shot learning settings, including the generation of synthetic datasets for training and testing. However, to reliably use these synthetic datasets, it is…
The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has led to growing interest in using synthetic data to train future models. However, this creates a self-consuming retraining loop, where models are trained on their own outputs and may…
Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly prioritize user validation over epistemic accuracy - a phenomenon known as sycophancy. We present The Silicon Mirror, an orchestration framework that dynamically detects user persuasion tactics and…
Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit a puzzling disparity in their formal linguistic competence: while they learn some linguistic phenomena with near-perfect mastery, they often perform below chance on others, even after training on…
A common and effective means for improving language model capabilities involves finetuning a ``student'' language model's parameters on generations from a more proficient ``teacher'' model. Termed ``synthetic data'', these generations are…
Through alignment with human preferences, Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced significantly in generating honest, harmless, and helpful responses. However, collecting high-quality preference data is a resource-intensive and…
The increasing integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into decision-making frameworks has exposed significant vulnerabilities to social compliance, specifically sycophancy and conformity. However, a critical research gap exists…
Large language models (LLMs) have recently shown strong performance on mathematical benchmarks. At the same time, they are prone to hallucination and sycophancy, often providing convincing but flawed proofs for incorrect mathematical…