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Related papers: Accounting for Sycophancy in Language Model Uncert…

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Sycophancy refers to the tendency of a large language model to align its outputs with the user's perceived preferences, beliefs, or opinions, in order to look favorable, regardless of whether those statements are factually correct. This…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-05 María Victoria Carro

Human feedback is commonly utilized to finetune AI assistants. But human feedback may also encourage model responses that match user beliefs over truthful ones, a behaviour known as sycophancy. We investigate the prevalence of sycophancy in…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of natural language processing tasks. However, their tendency to exhibit sycophantic behavior - excessively agreeing with or flattering users - poses…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-30 Lars Malmqvist

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 (LLMs) are expected to provide helpful and harmless responses, yet they often exhibit sycophancy--conforming to user beliefs regardless of factual accuracy or ethical soundness. Prior research on sycophancy has…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Jiseung Hong , Grace Byun , Seungone Kim , Kai Shu , Jinho D. Choi

Reliable uncertainty quantification is a first step towards building explainable, transparent, and accountable artificial intelligent systems. Recent progress in Bayesian deep learning has made such quantification realizable. In this paper,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-11-20 Yijun Xiao , William Yang Wang

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

Human users increasingly communicate with large language models (LLMs), but LLMs suffer from frequent overconfidence in their output, even when its accuracy is questionable, which undermines their trustworthiness and perceived legitimacy.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Dennis Ulmer , Alexandra Lorson , Ivan Titov , Christian Hardmeier

Rapid improvements in large language models have unveiled a critical challenge in human-AI interaction: sycophancy. In this context, sycophancy refers to the tendency of models to excessively agree with or flatter users, often at the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Joshua Liu , Aarav Jain , Soham Takuri , Srihan Vege , Aslihan Akalin , Kevin Zhu , Sean O'Brien , Vasu Sharma

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

With the growing adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) for open-ended tasks, accurately assessing epistemic uncertainty, which reflects a model's lack of knowledge, has become crucial to ensuring reliable outcomes. However, quantifying…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Xinyi Liu , Weiguang Wang , Hangfeng He

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

Conversation forecasting tasks a model with predicting the outcome of an unfolding conversation. For instance, it can be applied in social media moderation to predict harmful user behaviors before they occur, allowing for preventative…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Anthony Sicilia , Malihe Alikhani

Large language models (LLMs) are known to abandon their initial stance to conform to user pushback. While prior research largely attributes this behavior to sycophancy learned during reinforcement learning from human feedback, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Kevin H. Guo , Chao Yan , Avinash Baidya , Katherine Brown , Xiang Gao , Juming Xiong , Zhijun Yin , Bradley A. Malin

Sycophancy (overly agreeable or flattering behavior) poses a fundamental challenge for human-AI collaboration, particularly in high-stakes decision-making domains such as health, law, and education. A central difficulty in studying…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Katherine Atwell , Pedram Heydari , Anthony Sicilia , Malihe Alikhani

Appropriate reliance is critical to achieving synergistic human-AI collaboration. For instance, when users over-rely on AI assistance, their human-AI team performance is bounded by the model's capability. This work studies how the…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Shiye Cao , Anqi Liu , Chien-Ming Huang

Recent work has sought to quantify large language model uncertainty to facilitate model control and modulate user trust. Previous works focus on measures of uncertainty that are theoretically grounded or reflect the average overt behavior…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Kyle Moore , Jesse Roberts , Daryl Watson , Pamela Wisniewski

AI sycophancy has become a prominent concern in large language model (LLM) research. Yet the term lacks a consistent definition and has been applied to behaviors ranging from agreeing with a user's false claim to excessively praising the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Meryl Ye , Lujain Ibrahim , Jessica Y. Bo , Myra Cheng , Ida Mattsson , Daniel Vennemeyer , Robert Kraut , Steve Rathje

_Uncertainty expressions_ such as "probably" or "highly unlikely" are pervasive in human language. While prior work has established that there is population-level agreement in terms of how humans quantitatively interpret these expressions,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-08 Catarina G Belem , Markelle Kelly , Mark Steyvers , Sameer Singh , Padhraic Smyth

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
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