Tracing mechanisms of sycophantic agreement in language models

arXiv:2609.35822 · cs.CL, cs.LG · Submitted 2026-09-21 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL, cs.LG

Submitted: 2026-09-21

Updated: 2026-09-21

Terminology

• Sycophancy — 47× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Accuracy — 35× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Ablation — 12× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Generalization — 7× in this paper · explained in 13 episodes
• Transformer — 5× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Abstraction — 4× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Alignment — 4× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Decode — 4× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Generative AI — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Interpretability — 2× in this paper · explained in 15 episodes
• LLM judge — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Massive Multitask Language Understanding — 2× in this paper
• Benchmark — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Core — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• In-Context Learning — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Instruction Tuning — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Linear probe — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Regularization — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Sparsity — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Steering — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Trace — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes

Sources

• A Rational Analysis of the Effects of Sycophantic AI
• Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size
• The Llama 3 Herd of Models
• Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding
• Mistral 7B
• A Mechanistic View of Authority Hierarchy in LLM Sycophancy
• LLMs Know They're Wrong and Agree Anyway: The Shared Sycophancy-Lying Circuit
• How LLMs Are Persuaded: A Few Attention Heads, Rerouted
• Sycophancy Is Not One Thing: Causal Separation of Sycophantic Behaviors in LLMs
• Simple synthetic data reduces sycophancy in large language models
• The Truthfulness Spectrum Hypothesis

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