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Related papers: SycEval: Evaluating LLM Sycophancy

200 papers

We investigate how the presence and type of interaction context shapes sycophancy in LLMs. While real-world interactions allow models to mirror a user's values, preferences, and self-image, prior work often studies sycophancy in zero-shot…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Shomik Jain , Charlotte Park , Matt Viana , Ashia Wilson , Dana Calacci

Sycophantic response patterns in Large Language Models (LLMs) have been increasingly claimed in the literature. We review methodological challenges in measuring LLM sycophancy and identify five core operationalizations. Despite sycophancy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Jan Batzner , Volker Stocker , Stefan Schmid , Gjergji Kasneci

LLMs are known to exhibit sycophancy: agreeing with and flattering users, even at the cost of correctness. Prior work measures sycophancy only as direct agreement with users' explicitly stated beliefs that can be compared to a ground truth.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Myra Cheng , Sunny Yu , Cinoo Lee , Pranav Khadpe , Lujain Ibrahim , Dan Jurafsky

Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit highly agreeable and reinforcing conversational styles, also known as AI-sycophancy. Although this pattern arises from training objectives that reward user satisfaction over accuracy, it may become…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Zeyi Lu , Angelica Henestrosa , Pavel Chizhov , Ivan P. Yamshchikov

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

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…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Rafael M. Batista , Thomas L. Griffiths

We present a systematic framework of indices designed to characterize Large Language Model (LLM) responses when challenged with rebuttals during a chat. Assessing how LLMs respond to user dissent is crucial for understanding their…

Physics Education · Physics 2026-01-08 Justin C. Dunlap , Anne-Simone Parent , Ralf Widenhorn

This paper presents an in-depth analysis of the performance of seven different Large Language Models (LLMs) in solving a diverse set of math advanced calculus problems. The study aims to evaluate these models' accuracy, reliability, and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-07 In Hak Moon

Despite their widespread use in fact-checking, moderation, and high-stakes decision-making, large language models (LLMs) remain poorly understood as judges of truth. This study presents the largest evaluation to date of LLMs' veracity…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Emilio Barkett , Olivia Long , Madhavendra Thakur

Given the increased use of LLMs in financial systems today, it becomes important to evaluate the safety and robustness of such systems. One failure mode that LLMs frequently display in general domain settings is that of sycophancy. That is,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Zhenyu Zhao , Aparna Balagopalan , Adi Agrawal , Dilshoda Yergasheva , Waseem Alshikh , Daniel M. Bikel

Prompt sensitivity, referring to the phenomenon where paraphrasing (i.e., repeating something written or spoken using different words) leads to significant changes in large language model (LLM) performance, has been widely accepted as a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Andong Hua , Kenan Tang , Chenhe Gu , Jindong Gu , Eric Wong , Yao Qin

Purpose: It has become increasingly likely that Large Language Models (LLMs) will be used to score the quality of academic publications to support research assessment goals in the future. This may cause problems for fields with competing…

Digital Libraries · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Mike Thelwall , Ralph Schroeder , Meena Dhanda

People increasingly hold sustained, open-ended conversations with large language models (LLMs). Public reports and early studies suggest that, in such settings, models can reinforce delusional or conspiratorial ideation or even amplify…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Peter Kirgis , Ben Hawriluk , Sherrie Feng , Aslan Bilimer , Sam Paech , Zeynep Tufekci

Large language models (LLMs), while increasingly used in domains requiring factual rigor, often display a troubling behavior: sycophancy, the tendency to align with user beliefs regardless of correctness. This tendency is reinforced by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-20 Kaiwei Zhang , Qi Jia , Zijian Chen , Wei Sun , Xiangyang Zhu , Chunyi Li , Dandan Zhu , Guangtao Zhai

There is a growing literature on reasoning by large language models (LLMs), but the discussion on the uncertainty in their responses is still lacking. Our aim is to assess the extent of confidence that LLMs have in their answers and how it…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-23 Yudi Pawitan , Chris Holmes

Lab results are often confusing and hard to understand. Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT have opened a promising avenue for patients to get their questions answered. We aim to assess the feasibility of using LLMs to generate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-23 Zhe He , Balu Bhasuran , Qiao Jin , Shubo Tian , Karim Hanna , Cindy Shavor , Lisbeth Garcia Arguello , Patrick Murray , Zhiyong Lu

UK academic departments are evaluated partly on the statements that they write about the value of their research environments for the Research Excellence Framework (REF) periodic assessments. These statements mix qualitative narratives and…

Digital Libraries · Computer Science 2025-12-08 Kayvan Kousha , Mike Thelwall , Elizabeth Gadd

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) 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) exhibit expert-level performance in tasks across a wide range of different domains. Ethical issues raised by LLMs and the need to align future versions makes it important to know how state of the art models…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Guilherme F. C. F. Almeida , José Luiz Nunes , Neele Engelmann , Alex Wiegmann , Marcelo de Araújo