Related papers: When Helpfulness Becomes Sycophancy: Sycophancy is…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in educational settings as interactive tools for collaboration. However, their tendency toward sycophancy, aligning with user beliefs even when incorrect, raises concerns for learning and…
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) often exhibit sycophantic behavior, agreeing with user-stated opinions even when those contradict factual knowledge. While prior work has documented this tendency, the internal mechanisms that enable such…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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,…
The increasing integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into decision-making frameworks has exposed significant vulnerabilities to social compliance, specifically sycophancy and conformity. However, a critical research gap exists…
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…
Large language models (LLMs) are known to abandon their initial stance to conform to user pushback. While prior research largely attributes this behavior to sycophancy learned during reinforcement learning from human feedback, we…
As LLMs are increasingly integrated into clinical workflows, their tendency for sycophancy, prioritizing user agreement over factual accuracy, poses significant risks to patient safety. While existing evaluations often rely on subjective…
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…
Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit sycophancy, distorting responses to align with user beliefs, notably by readily agreeing with user counterarguments. Paradoxically, LLMs are increasingly adopted as successful evaluative agents for…
This position paper argues that effective tutoring requires corrective friction: surfacing misconceptions and challenging them supportively to drive conceptual change. Yet preference-aligned LLMs can trade epistemic rigor for agreeableness.…
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…
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…
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…
Sycophancy, the tendency of LLM-based chatbots to express excessive agreement with their users, even when inappropriate, is emerging as a significant risk in human-AI interactions. However, the extent to which this affects human-LLM…