English
Related papers

Related papers: Intersectional Sycophancy: How Perceived User Demo…

200 papers

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…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Yuan Sun , Ting Wang

Fine-tuning large language models on narrow data with harmful content produces broadly misaligned behavior on unrelated prompts, a phenomenon known as emergent misalignment. We propose that emergent misalignment involves persona-model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Davi Bastos Costa , Renato Vicente

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in simulating human behaviour and social intelligence. However, they risk perpetuating societal biases, especially when demographic information is involved. We introduce…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Bryan Chen Zhengyu Tan , Roy Ka-Wei Lee

Large language models are often described as sycophantic, in the sense that they appear to flatter users or mirror their beliefs. We argue that this label is conceptually misleading: sycophancy implies motives and strategic intent, which…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Federico Germani , Giovanni Spitale

Sycophantic response patterns in Large Language Models (LLMs) have been increasingly claimed in the literature. We review methodological challenges in measuring LLM sycophancy and identify five core operationalizations. Despite sycophancy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Jan Batzner , Volker Stocker , Stefan Schmid , Gjergji Kasneci

Large Language Models (LLMs) tend to prioritize adherence to user prompts over providing veracious responses, leading to the sycophancy issue. When challenged by users, LLMs tend to admit mistakes and provide inaccurate responses even if…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-06 Wei Chen , Zhen Huang , Liang Xie , Binbin Lin , Houqiang Li , Le Lu , Xinmei Tian , Deng Cai , Yonggang Zhang , Wenxiao Wang , Xu Shen , Jieping Ye

In the study of LLMs, sycophancy represents a prevalent hallucination that poses significant challenges to these models. Specifically, LLMs often fail to adhere to original correct responses, instead blindly agreeing with users' opinions,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Shuo Li , Tao Ji , Xiaoran Fan , Linsheng Lu , Leyi Yang , Yuming Yang , Zhiheng Xi , Rui Zheng , Yuran Wang , Xiaohui Zhao , Tao Gui , Qi Zhang , Xuanjing Huang

Refusal behavior by Large Language Models is increasingly visible in content moderation, yet little is known about how refusals vary by the identity of the user making the request. This study investigates refusal as a sociotechnical outcome…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Sha Luo , Sang Jung Kim , Zening Duan , Kaiping Chen

Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to sycophantic behavior, uncritically conforming to user beliefs. As models increasingly condition responses on user-specific context (personality traits, preferences, conversation history), they gain…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Sean W. Kelley , Christoph Riedl

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Zeyi Lu , Angelica Henestrosa , Pavel Chizhov , Ivan P. Yamshchikov

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Muhammad Usama , Dong Eui Chang

Conversational AI systems exhibit a level of human-like behavior that promises to have profound impacts on many aspects of daily life -- how people access information, create content, and seek social support. Yet these models have also…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2023-06-21 Christopher M. Homan , Greg Serapio-Garcia , Lora Aroyo , Mark Diaz , Alicia Parrish , Vinodkumar Prabhakaran , Alex S. Taylor , Ding Wang

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-27 Aswin RRV , Nemika Tyagi , Md Nayem Uddin , Neeraj Varshney , Chitta Baral

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become widely used to model and simulate human behavior, understanding their biases becomes critical. We developed an experimental framework using Big Five personality surveys and uncovered a previously…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-11-25 Aadesh Salecha , Molly E. Ireland , Shashanka Subrahmanya , João Sedoc , Lyle H. Ungar , Johannes C. Eichstaedt

Large Language Models (LLMs) can exhibit latent biases towards specific nationalities even when explicit demographic markers are not present. In this work, we introduce a novel name-based benchmarking approach derived from the Bias…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Giulio Pelosio , Devesh Batra , Noémie Bovey , Robert Hankache , Cristovao Iglesias , Greig Cowan , Raad Khraishi

AI sycophancy is increasingly recognized as a harmful alignment, but research remains fragmented and underdeveloped at the conceptual level. This article redefines AI sycophancy as the tendency of large language models (LLMs) and other…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Lihua Du , Xing Lyu , Lezi Xie , Bo Feng

As language models are deployed as autonomous agents that negotiate, cooperate, and compete on behalf of human principals, their strategic dispositions acquire direct economic consequences. Here we show, across 51,906 game-theoretic trials…

Physics and Society · Physics 2026-04-23 Felipe M. Affonso

The interactive nature of Large Language Models (LLMs) theoretically allows models to refine and improve their answers, yet systematic analysis of the multi-turn behavior of LLMs remains limited. In this paper, we propose the FlipFlop…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-22 Philippe Laban , Lidiya Murakhovs'ka , Caiming Xiong , Chien-Sheng Wu

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents in uncertain, sequential decision-making contexts. Yet it remains poorly understood whether the behaviors they exhibit in such environments reflect principled…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Sankalp Dubedy

Large language models (LLMs) have recently shown strong performance on mathematical benchmarks. At the same time, they are prone to hallucination and sycophancy, often providing convincing but flawed proofs for incorrect mathematical…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Ivo Petrov , Jasper Dekoninck , Martin Vechev