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Prior research shows that large language models (LLMs) exhibit systematic extrapolation bias when forming predictions from both experimental and real-world data, and that prompt-based approaches appear limited in alleviating this bias. We…

General Finance · Quantitative Finance 2026-05-05 Zhenyu Gao , Wenxi Jiang , Yutong Yan

Sycophancy is an undesirable behavior where models tailor their responses to follow a human user's view even when that view is not objectively correct (e.g., adapting liberal views once a user reveals that they are liberal). In this paper,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-16 Jerry Wei , Da Huang , Yifeng Lu , Denny Zhou , Quoc V. Le

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Ivo Petrov , Jasper Dekoninck , Martin Vechev

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is crucial for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human instructions. The primary goal during SFT is to select a small yet representative subset of training data from the larger pool, such that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Tingyu Xia , Bowen Yu , Kai Dang , An Yang , Yuan Wu , Yuan Tian , Yi Chang , Junyang Lin

Frontier Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Gemini can decipher cryptic compiler errors for novice programmers, but their computational scale, cost, and tendency to over-assist make them problematic for widespread pedagogical…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2025-07-09 Lorenzo Lee Solano , Charles Koutcheme , Juho Leinonen , Alexandra Vassar , Jake Renzella

Large Language Models (LLMs) are known to hallucinate, whereby they generate plausible but inaccurate text. This phenomenon poses significant risks in critical applications, such as medicine or law, necessitating robust hallucination…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Benedict Aaron Tjandra , Muhammed Razzak , Jannik Kossen , Kunal Handa , Yarin Gal

Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit sycophancy, distorting responses to align with user beliefs, notably by readily agreeing with user counterarguments. Paradoxically, LLMs are increasingly adopted as successful evaluative agents for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Sungwon Kim , Daniel Khashabi

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is crucial for adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to specific tasks. In this work, we demonstrate that the order of training data can lead to significant training imbalances, potentially resulting in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Yiming Ju , Ziyi Ni , Xingrun Xing , Zhixiong Zeng , hanyu Zhao , Siqi Fan , Zheng Zhang

Large Language Models (LLMs), when used in educational settings without pedagogical fine-tuning, often provide immediate answers rather than guiding students through the problem-solving process. This approach falls short of pedagogically…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Shashank Sonkar , Kangqi Ni , Sapana Chaudhary , Richard G. Baraniuk

In recent years, developing compact and efficient large language models (LLMs) has emerged as a thriving area of research. Traditional Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), which relies on singular ground truth labels, often fails to capture…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Jingyao Li , Senqiao Yang , Sitong Wu , Han Shi , Chuanyang Zheng , Hong Xu , Jiaya Jia

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in educational settings as interactive tools for collaboration. However, their tendency toward sycophancy, aligning with user beliefs even when incorrect, raises concerns for learning and…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Cansu Koyuturk , Sabrina Guidotti , Dimitri Ognibene

Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit sycophantic behavior, agreeing with user-stated opinions even when those contradict factual knowledge. While prior work has documented this tendency, the internal mechanisms that enable such…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Keyu Wang , Jin Li , Shu Yang , Zhuoran Zhang , Di Wang

Large Language Models have been demonstrating broadly satisfactory generative abilities for users, which seems to be due to the intensive use of human feedback that refines responses. Nevertheless, suggestibility inherited via human…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-26 Leonardo Ranaldi , Giulia Pucci

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a standard approach for adapting large language models to specialized domains, yet its application to protein sequence modeling and protein language models (PLMs) remains ad hoc. This is in part because…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-11 Amin Tavakoli , Raswanth Murugan , Ozan Gokdemir , Arvind Ramanathan , Frances Arnold , Anima Anandkumar

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable abilities in diverse natural language processing (NLP) tasks. The LLMs generally undergo supervised fine-tuning (SFT) followed by preference alignment to be usable in downstream…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-27 Shiva Kumar Pentyala , Zhichao Wang , Bin Bi , Kiran Ramnath , Xiang-Bo Mao , Regunathan Radhakrishnan , Sitaram Asur , Na , Cheng

Large language models (LLMs) have been widely used for problem-solving tasks. Most recent work improves their performance through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with labeled data or reinforcement learning (RL) from task feedback. In this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Hang Li , Kaiqi Yang , Yucheng Chu , Hui Liu , Jiliang Tang

One way to enhance the reasoning capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) is to conduct Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) using Chain-of-Thought (CoT) annotations. This approach does not show sufficiently strong generalization ability,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-16 Trung Quoc Luong , Xinbo Zhang , Zhanming Jie , Peng Sun , Xiaoran Jin , Hang Li

To acquire instruction-following capabilities, large language models (LLMs) undergo instruction tuning, where they are trained on instruction-response pairs using next-token prediction (NTP). Efforts to improve instruction tuning often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Yuxin Xiao , Shujian Zhang , Wenxuan Zhou , Marzyeh Ghassemi , Sanqiang Zhao

Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit sycophancy: agreement with user stance even when it conflicts with the model's opinion. While prior work has mostly studied this in single-agent settings, it remains underexplored in collaborative…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Vira Kasprova , Amruta Parulekar , Abdulrahman AlRabah , Krishna Agaram , Ritwik Garg , Sagar Jha , Nimet Beyza Bozdag , Dilek Hakkani-Tur

Sycophancy, the tendency of LLM-based chatbots to express excessive agreement with their users, even when inappropriate, is emerging as a significant risk in human-AI interactions. However, the extent to which this affects human-LLM…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Jessica Y. Bo , Majeed Kazemitabaar , Mengqing Deng , Michael Inzlicht , Ashton Anderson