Talked Out of the Truth: Sycophancy in the Reasoning Chains of Multimodal Models

arXiv:2608.28623 · cs.CL, cs.AI · Submitted 2026-07-30 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL, cs.AI

Submitted: 2026-07-30

Updated: 2026-10-02

Terminology

• Sycophancy — 167× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Benchmark — 19× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Visual Evidence Reading — 16× in this paper
• User Belief Acknowledgment — 13× in this paper
• Answer Commitment — 12× in this paper
• Reasoning and Derivation — 12× in this paper
• Uncertainty Expression and Reconsideration — 12× in this paper
• Trace — 11× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Multimodal Reasoning — 9× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• LLM judge — 6× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Transformer — 6× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Ablation — 4× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Accuracy — 4× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Embeddings — 4× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Failure Taxonomy — 4× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Cosine Similarity — 3× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Ablation study — 2× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Benchmarking — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Failure Modes — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Alignment — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Annotator Agreement — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Calibration — 1× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Chain-of-Thought Prompting — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Distribution Shift — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Fine-Tuning — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Grounding — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Model Drift — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Multimodal Inputs — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Reinforcement Learning — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes

Sources

• Thought Anchors: Which LLM Reasoning Steps Matter?
• Reasoning Models Don't Always Say What They Think
• PathVQA: 30000+ Questions for Medical Visual Question Answering
• MONICA: Real-Time Monitoring and Calibration of Chain-of-Thought Sycophancy in Large Reasoning Models
• Measuring Faithfulness in Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
• Have the VLMs Lost Confidence? A Study of Sycophancy in VLMs
• Perception, Reason, Think, and Plan: A Survey on Large Multimodal Reasoning Models
• BBQ-V: Benchmarking Visual Stereotype Bias in Large Multimodal Models
• Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models
• Towards Large Reasoning Models: A Survey of Reinforced Reasoning with Large Language Models
• Benchmarking and Mitigating Sycophancy in Medical Vision Language Models
• EchoBench: Benchmarking Sycophancy in Medical Large Vision-Language Models
• Sycophancy in Vision-Language Models: A Systematic Analysis and an Inference-Time Mitigation Framework

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