Related papers: Sycophantic Anchors: Localizing and Quantifying Us…
The design of safety-critical agents based on large language models (LLMs) requires more than simple prompt engineering. This paper presents a comprehensive information-theoretic analysis of how rule encodings in system prompts influence…
Modern large language models (LLMs) are increasingly fine-tuned via reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) or related reward optimisation schemes. While such procedures improve perceived helpfulness, we investigate whether…
Rapid improvements in large language models have unveiled a critical challenge in human-AI interaction: sycophancy. In this context, sycophancy refers to the tendency of models to excessively agree with or flatter users, often at the…
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…
Analogical reasoning is at the core of human cognition, serving as an important foundation for a variety of intellectual activities. While prior work has shown that LLMs can represent task patterns and surface-level concepts, it remains…
Pluralistic alignment is typically operationalised as preference aggregation: producing responses that span (Overton), steer toward (Steerable), or proportionally represent (Distributional) diverse human values. We argue that aggregation…
Reasoning models are evaluated on single-turn benchmarks but deployed in multi-turn dialogue, where users push back on correct answers. Under sustained adversarial pressure we find a previously undocumented failure mode: the…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly acting as collaborative writing partners, raising questions about their impact on human agency. In this exploratory work, we investigate five "dark patterns" in human-AI co-creativity -- subtle…
In contested domains, instruction-tuned language models must balance user-alignment pressures against faithfulness to the in-context evidence. To evaluate this tension, we introduce a controlled epistemic-conflict framework grounded in the…
This paper primarily demonstrates a method to quantitatively assess the alignment between multi-step, structured reasoning in large language models and human preferences. We introduce the Alignment Score, a semantic-level metric that…
Large language models often exhibit increased sycophantic behavior after preference-based post-training, showing a stronger tendency to affirm a user's stated or implied belief even when this conflicts with factual accuracy or sound…
While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive reasoning capabilities, growing evidence suggests much of their success stems from memorized answer-reasoning patterns rather than genuine inference. In this work, we investigate a…
The widespread proliferation of online content has intensified concerns about clickbait, deceptive or exaggerated headlines designed to attract attention. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising avenue for addressing this…
Large language models increasingly fail in a way that scalar accuracy cannot diagnose: they produce a sound reasoning trace and then abandon it under social pressure or an authoritative hint. We argue that this is a control failure, not a…
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) 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…
Sycophancy is a key behavioral risk in LLMs, yet is often treated as an isolated failure mode that occurs via a single causal mechanism. We instead propose modeling it as geometric and causal compositions of psychometric traits such as…
We discover that large language models exhibit \emph{spectral phase transitions} in their hidden activation spaces when engaging in reasoning versus factual recall. Through systematic spectral analysis across \textbf{11 models} spanning…
Large language models demonstrate strong reasoning capabilities through chain-of-thought prompting, but whether this reasoning quality transfers across languages remains underexplored. We introduce a human-validated framework to evaluate…
In many scenarios, the interpretability of machine learning models is a highly required but difficult task. To explain the individual predictions of such models, local model-agnostic approaches have been proposed. However, the process…