paper-with-me

홈 › Papers

From Yes-Men to Truth-Tellers: Addressing Sycophancy in Large Language Models with Pinpoint Tuning

2024-09-03 · Wei Chen, Zhen Huang, Liang Xie, Binbin Lin, Houqiang Li, Le Lu, Xinmei Tian, Deng Cai, Yonggang Zhang, Wenxiao Wang, Xu Shen, Jieping Ye

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 they initially provided the correct answer. Recent works propose to employ supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to mitigate the sycophancy issue, while it typically leads to the degeneration of LLMs' general capability. To address the challenge, we propose a novel supervised pinpoint tuning (SPT), where the region-of-interest modules are tuned for a given objective. Specifically, SPT first reveals and verifies a small percentage (<5%) of the basic modules, which significantly affect a particular behavior of LLMs. i.e., sycophancy. Subsequently, SPT merely fine-tunes these identified modules while freezing the rest. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed SPT, we conduct comprehensive experiments, demonstrating that SPT significantly mitigates the sycophancy issue of LLMs (even better than SFT). Moreover, SPT introduces limited or even no side effects on the general capability of LLMs. Our results shed light on how to precisely, effectively, and efficiently explain and improve the targeted ability of LLMs.

📄 PDF Abstract BibTeX arXiv:2409.01658

Code (0)

등록된 구현이 없습니다.

Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반

Social Sycophancy: A Broader Understanding of LLM Sycophancy

2025-05-20 · Myra Cheng, Sunny Yu, Cinoo Lee, Pranav Khadpe 외

A serious risk to the safety and utility of LLMs is sycophancy, i.e., excessive agreement with and flattery of the user. Yet existing work focuses on only one aspect of sycophancy: agreement with users' explicitly stated…

Acting Flatterers via LLMs Sycophancy: Combating Clickbait with LLMs Opposing-Stance Reasoning

2026-01-17 · Chaowei Zhang, Xiansheng Luo, Zewei Zhang, Yi Zhu 외 arxiv

The widespread proliferation of online content has intensified concerns about clickbait, deceptive or exaggerated headlines designed to attract attention. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising avenue for a…

Contrastive Learning

When Truth Is Overridden: Uncovering the Internal Origins of Sycophancy in Large Language Models

2025-08-04 · Keyu Wang, Jin Li, Shu Yang, Zhuoran Zhang 외 arxiv

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 tha…

Beacon: Single-Turn Diagnosis and Mitigation of Latent Sycophancy in Large Language Models

2025-10-19 · Sanskar Pandey, Ruhaan Chopra, Angkul Puniya, Sohom Pal arxiv

Large language models internalize a structural trade-off between truthfulness and obsequious flattery, emerging from reward optimization that conflates helpfulness with polite submission. This latent bias, known as sycop…

Internal Reasoning vs. External Control: A Thermodynamic Analysis of Sycophancy in Large Language Models

2025-12-16 · Edward Y. Chang arxiv

Large Language Models exhibit sycophancy: prioritizing agreeableness over correctness. Current remedies evaluate reasoning outcomes: RLHF rewards correct answers, self-correction critiques outputs. All require ground tru…