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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…
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…
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.…
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…
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) increasingly rely on chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting to solve mathematical and logical reasoning tasks. Yet, a central question remains: to what extent are these generated rationales \emph{faithful} to the…
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…
This study explores the sycophantic tendencies of Large Language Models (LLMs), where these models tend to provide answers that match what users want to hear, even if they are not entirely correct. The motivation behind this exploration…
Large language models trained under diverse objectives and architectures have been shown to develop increasingly similar internal representations, an observation formalized as the Platonic Representation Hypothesis. Whether this…
LLMs can be socially sycophantic, affirming users when they ask questions like "am I in the wrong?" rather than providing genuine assessment. We hypothesize that this behavior arises from incorrect assumptions about the user, like…
This position paper argues that sycophancy in LLMs is a boundary failure between social alignment and epistemic integrity. Existing work often operationalizes sycophancy through external behavior such as agreement with incorrect user…
Current frontier large-language models rely on reasoning to achieve state-of-the-art performance. Many existing interpretability are limited in this area, as standard methods have been designed to study single forward passes of a model…
As LLMs expand from assistance to decision support, a dangerous pattern emerges: fluent agreement without calibrated judgment. Low-friction assistants can become sycophantic, baking in implicit assumptions and pushing verification costs…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Modern language models often exhibit powerful but brittle behavior, leading to the development of larger and more diverse benchmarks to reliably assess their behavior. Here, we suggest that model performance can be benchmarked and…
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…
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…