Related papers: Ask don't tell: Reducing sycophancy in large langu…
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…
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…
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) 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…
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…
Despite growing attention to LLM sycophancy from researchers and developers, users' own experiences of this behavior remain underexplored. We examine how everyday users experience AI sycophancy through Reddit discussions. Using our ODR…
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…
Reasoning models frequently agree with incorrect user suggestions -- a behavior known as sycophancy. However, it is unclear where in the reasoning trace this agreement originates and how strong the commitment is. We introduce…
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…
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…
Despite the remarkable capabilities of large language models, current training paradigms inadvertently foster \textit{sycophancy}, i.e., the tendency of a model to agree with or reinforce user-provided information even when it's factually…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance across a wide range of tasks, but they are also prone to sycophancy, the tendency to agree with user statements regardless of validity. Previous research has outlined both the…
Large Language Models exhibit sycophancy: prioritizing agreeableness over correctness. Current remedies evaluate reasoning outcomes: RLHF rewards correct answers, self-correction critiques outputs. All require ground truth, which is often…
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…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in clinical and care settings. This exploratory study investigates whether LLMs exhibit sycophantic behavior - adapting their responses to social expectation signals rather than maintaining…