Related papers: Not Just RLHF: Why Alignment Alone Won't Fix Multi…

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is the standard method to align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. In this work, we introduce alignment tampering, a potential vulnerability where the LLM undergoing…

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.…

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…

Multi-stage LLM pipelines that perform multi-agent debate, intrinsic self-correction, or retrieval-augmented verification exhibit puzzling aggregate behaviors: accuracy plateaus and reversals across rounds, non-replication of debate gains…

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated extraordinary capabilities in conducting conversations based on image inputs. However, we observe that MLLMs exhibit a pronounced form of visual sycophantic behavior. While similar…

Reinforcement learning has shown remarkable performance in aligning language models with human preferences, leading to the rise of attention towards developing RLHF platforms. These platforms enable users to fine-tune models without…

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly prioritize user validation over epistemic accuracy - a phenomenon known as sycophancy. We present The Silicon Mirror, an orchestration framework that dynamically detects user persuasion tactics and…

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…

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) are increasingly relied upon for complex workflows, yet their ability to maintain flow of instructions remains underexplored. Existing benchmarks conflate task complexity with structural ordering, making it…

Multi-agent systems achieve state-of-the-art outcomes through peer collaboration. However, when an agent in the pipeline silently drops a constraint, the system's final output may look correct even though the reasoning chain was quietly…

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,…

Recent mixed-policy optimization methods for LLM reasoning that interleave or blend supervised and reinforcement learning signals report improvements over the standard SFT-then-RL pipeline. We show that numerous recently published research…

Prompt leakage poses a compelling security and privacy threat in LLM applications. Leakage of system prompts may compromise intellectual property, and act as adversarial reconnaissance for an attacker. A systematic evaluation of prompt…

A frustratingly easy technique known as the prefilling attack has been shown to effectively circumvent the safety alignment of frontier LLMs by simply prefilling the assistant response with an affirmative prefix before decoding. In…

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly rely on chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting to solve mathematical and logical reasoning tasks. Yet, a central question remains: to what extent are these generated rationales \emph{faithful} to the…

In recent years, NLP practitioners have converged on the following practice: (i) import an off-the-shelf pretrained (masked) language model; (ii) append a multilayer perceptron atop the CLS token's hidden representation (with randomly…

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…

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…

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown significant capability in vision-language understanding. However, one critical issue that persists in these models is sycophancy, where models are unduly influenced by leading or deceptive…