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Large language models internalize a structural trade-off between truthfulness and obsequious flattery, emerging from reward optimization that conflates helpfulness with polite submission. This latent bias, known as sycophancy, manifests as…
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…
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) 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…
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…
Large language models increasingly serve as conversational agents that adopt personas and role-play characters at user request. This capability, while valuable, raises concerns about sycophancy: the tendency to provide responses that…
Effective human-machine collaboration requires machine learning models to externalize uncertainty, so users can reflect and intervene when necessary. For language models, these representations of uncertainty may be impacted by sycophancy…
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…
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…
Sycophancy, the tendency of large language models to favour user-affirming responses over critical engagement, has been identified as an alignment failure, particularly in high-stakes advisory and social contexts. While prior work has…
Large language models exhibit sycophancy: the tendency to shift outputs toward user-expressed stances, regardless of correctness or consistency. While prior work has studied this issue and its impacts, rigorous computational linguistic…
Sycophancy, an excessive tendency of AI models to agree with user input at the expense of factual accuracy or in contradiction of visual evidence, poses a critical and underexplored challenge for multimodal large language models (MLLMs).…
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…
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…
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…
LLM-powered conversational agents are increasingly influencing our decision-making, raising concerns about "sycophancy" - the tendency for LLMs to excessively agree with users even at the expense of truthfulness. While prior work has…
Large language models are often described as sycophantic, in the sense that they appear to flatter users or mirror their beliefs. We argue that this label is conceptually misleading: sycophancy implies motives and strategic intent, which…
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,…
Large Language Models (LLMs) interact with millions of people worldwide in applications such as customer support, education and healthcare. However, their ability to produce deceptive outputs, whether intentionally or inadvertently, poses…
Large Language Model (LLM) sycophancy is a growing concern. The current literature has largely examined sycophancy in contexts with clear right and wrong answers, like coding. However, AI is increasingly being used for emotional support and…