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This study examines how user-provided suggestions affect Large Language Models (LLMs) in a simulated educational context, where sycophancy poses significant risks. Testing five different LLMs from the OpenAI GPT-4o and GPT-4.1 model classes…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-13 Chuck Arvin

Large language models (LLMs) are revolutionizing every aspect of society. They are increasingly used in problem-solving tasks to substitute human assessment and reasoning. LLMs are trained on what humans write and are thus exposed to human…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Fengfei Sun , Ningke Li , Kailong Wang , Lorenz Goette

Large language models (LLMs) often display sycophancy, a tendency toward excessive agreeability. This behavior poses significant challenges for multi-agent debating systems (MADS) that rely on productive disagreement to refine arguments and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Binwei Yao , Chao Shang , Wanyu Du , Jianfeng He , Ruixue Lian , Yi Zhang , Hang Su , Sandesh Swamy , Yanjun Qi

Large language models (LLMs) often need to balance their internal parametric knowledge with external information, such as user beliefs and content from retrieved documents, in real-world scenarios like RAG or chat-based systems. A model's…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-27 Shuowei Li , Haoxin Li , Wenda Chu , Yi Fang

Using Large Language Models (LLMs) to simulate user opinions has received growing attention. Yet LLMs, especially trained with reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), are known to exhibit biases toward dominant viewpoints,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Ziyun Yu , Yiru Zhou , Chen Zhao , Hongyi Wen

As the importance of comprehensive evaluation in workshop courses increases, there is a growing demand for efficient and fair assessment methods that reduce the workload for faculty members. This paper presents an evaluation conducted with…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2024-05-30 Toru Ishida , Tongxi Liu , Hailong Wang , William K. Cheung

Alignment techniques often inadvertently induce sycophancy in LLMs. While prior studies studied this behaviour in direct-answer settings, the role of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning remains under-explored: does it serve as a logical…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Zhaoxin Feng , Zheng Chen , Jianfei Ma , Yip Tin Po , Emmanuele Chersoni , Bo Li

The conformity effect describes the tendency of individuals to align their responses with the majority. Studying this bias in large language models (LLMs) is crucial, as LLMs are increasingly used in various information-seeking and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Xiaochen Zhu , Caiqi Zhang , Tom Stafford , Nigel Collier , Andreas Vlachos

Large language models (LLMs) inherit biases from their training data and alignment processes, influencing their responses in subtle ways. While many studies have examined these biases, little work has explored their robustness during…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Virgile Rennard , Christos Xypolopoulos , Michalis Vazirgiannis

Large language models (LLMs) can produce erroneous responses that sound fluent and convincing, raising the risk that users will rely on these responses as if they were correct. Mitigating such overreliance is a key challenge. Through a…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Sunnie S. Y. Kim , Jennifer Wortman Vaughan , Q. Vera Liao , Tania Lombrozo , Olga Russakovsky

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly operate in environments where they encounter social information such as other agents' answers, tool outputs, or human recommendations. In humans, such inputs influence judgments in ways that depend…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Anooshka Bajaj , Zoran Tiganj

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) increasingly show reasoning rationales alongside their answers, turning "reasoning" into a user-interface element. While step-by-step rationales are typically associated with model performance, how they…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Xin Sun , Shu Wei , Jos A Bosch , Isao Echizen , Saku Sugawara , Abdallah El Ali

This paper investigates the reliability of explanations generated by large language models (LLMs) when prompted to explain their previous output. We evaluate two kinds of such self-explanations - extractive and counterfactual - using three…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-03 Korbinian Randl , John Pavlopoulos , Aron Henriksson , Tony Lindgren

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for accessing information on the web. Their truthfulness and factuality are thus of great interest. To help users make the right decisions about the information they get, LLMs should not…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-03 Chenglei Si , Navita Goyal , Sherry Tongshuang Wu , Chen Zhao , Shi Feng , Hal Daumé , Jordan Boyd-Graber

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

The use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for simulating user behavior in the domain of Interactive Information Retrieval has recently gained significant popularity. However, their application and capabilities remain highly debated and…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-05-07 Andreas Konstantin Kruff , Timo Breuer , Philipp Schaer

The profusion of knowledge encoded in large language models (LLMs) and their ability to apply this knowledge zero-shot in a range of settings makes them promising candidates for use in decision-making. However, they are currently limited by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Gabriel Freedman , Adam Dejl , Deniz Gorur , Xiang Yin , Antonio Rago , Francesca Toni

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) excel in generating personalized content and facilitating interactive dialogues, showcasing their remarkable aptitude for a myriad of applications. However, their capabilities in reasoning and providing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-16 Min Zhang , Sato Takumi , Jack Zhang , Jun Wang