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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

Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit sycophantic behaviors -- such as excessive agreement with or flattery of the user -- but it is unclear whether these behaviors arise from a single mechanism or multiple distinct processes. We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Daniel Vennemeyer , Phan Anh Duong , Tiffany Zhan , Tianyu Jiang

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

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

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…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Lihua Du , Xing Lyu , Lezi Xie , Bo Feng

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

Large language models excel at following explicit instructions, but they often struggle with ambiguous or incomplete user requests, defaulting to verbose, generic responses instead of seeking clarification. We introduce InfoQuest, a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Bryan L. M. de Oliveira , Luana G. B. Martins , Bruno Brandão , Luckeciano C. Melo

Mental-health dialogue models are increasingly evaluated by AI-based evaluators, yet these evaluators often treat surface empathy, supportiveness, or fluency as evidence of safety. In this paper, we study a hidden failure mode that we call…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Tianze Han , Beining Xu , Hanbo Zhang , Yongming Lu

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as conversational assistants in open-domain, multi-turn settings, where users often provide incomplete or ambiguous information. However, existing LLM-focused clarification benchmarks…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Sichun Luo , Yi Huang , Mukai Li , Shichang Meng , Fengyuan Liu , Zefa Hu , Junlan Feng , Qi Liu

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 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

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate human users in interactive settings such as therapy, education, and social role-play. While these simulations enable scalable training and evaluation of AI agents, off-the-shelf…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Marwa Abdulhai , Ryan Cheng , Donovan Clay , Tim Althoff , Sergey Levine , Natasha Jaques

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-22 Philippe Laban , Lidiya Murakhovs'ka , Caiming Xiong , Chien-Sheng Wu

Large Language Models (LLMs) tend to prioritize adherence to user prompts over providing veracious responses, leading to the sycophancy issue. When challenged by users, LLMs tend to admit mistakes and provide inaccurate responses even if…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-06 Wei Chen , Zhen Huang , Liang Xie , Binbin Lin , Houqiang Li , Le Lu , Xinmei Tian , Deng Cai , Yonggang Zhang , Wenxiao Wang , Xu Shen , Jieping Ye

We propose a novel preference alignment framework for improving spoken dialogue models on real-time conversations from user interactions. Current preference learning methods primarily focus on text-based language models, and are not…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Anne Wu , Laurent Mazaré , Neil Zeghidour , Alexandre Défossez

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly consulted for high-stakes life advice, yet they lack standard safeguards against providing confident but misguided responses. This creates risks of sycophancy and over-confidence. This paper…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Joshua Adrian Cahyono , Saran Subramanian

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

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as interactive agents, open-ended human-AI interactions can involve deceptive behaviors with serious real-world consequences, yet existing evaluations remain largely…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Yichen Wu , Qianqian Gao , Xudong Pan , Geng Hong , Min Yang

Audio Language Models (ALMs) have recently shown strong capabilities in unified reasoning over speech, sound, and natural language; yet they inherit behavioral issues observed in Large Language Models, including sycophancy--the tendency to…