Related papers: Intersectional Sycophancy: How Perceived User Demo…
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…
Large language models (LLMs), while increasingly used in domains requiring factual rigor, often display a troubling behavior: sycophancy, the tendency to align with user beliefs regardless of correctness. This tendency is reinforced by…
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…
Sycophancy, the tendency of language models to prioritize agreement with user preferences over principled reasoning, has been identified as a persistent alignment failure in English-language evaluations. However, it remains unclear whether…
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…
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance, leading to their widespread adoption as decision-support tools in resource-constrained contexts like hiring and admissions. There is, however, scientific consensus that AI…
The success of Large Language Models (LLMs) in multicultural environments hinges on their ability to understand users' diverse cultural backgrounds. We measure this capability by having an LLM simulate human profiles representing various…
To examine whether intersectional bias can be observed in language generation, we examine \emph{GPT-2} and \emph{GPT-NEO} models, ranging in size from 124 million to ~2.7 billion parameters. We conduct an experiment combining up to three…
Large language models must satisfy hard orthographic constraints during controlled text generation, yet systematic cross-family evaluation remains limited. We evaluate 39 configurations spanning three model families (Qwen3, Claude Haiku…
AI sycophancy has become a prominent concern in large language model (LLM) research. Yet the term lacks a consistent definition and has been applied to behaviors ranging from agreeing with a user's false claim to excessively praising the…
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…
We propose a novel way to evaluate sycophancy of LLMs in a direct and neutral way, mitigating various forms of uncontrolled bias, noise, or manipulative language, deliberately injected to prompts in prior works. A key novelty in our…
Large language models generate judgments that resemble those of humans. Yet the extent to which these models align with human judgments in interpreting figurative and socially grounded language remains uncertain. To investigate this, human…
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…
Telling an LLM to "be enthusiastic" raises its sycophancy rate from 30\% to 50\% on a lightly-aligned model, but has zero effect on a strongly-aligned one. We define this gap as the alignment floor,…
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…
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) are becoming pervasive in everyday life, yet their propensity to reproduce biases inherited from training data remains a pressing concern. Prior investigations into bias in LLMs have focused on the association…
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…