Beyond Social Pressure: Benchmarking Epistemic Attack in Large Language Models
Large language models (LLMs) can shift their answers under pressure in ways that reflect accommodation rather than reasoning. Prior work on sycophancy has focused mainly on disagreement, flattery, and preference alignment, leaving a broader set of epistemic failures less explored. We introduce \textbf{PPT-Bench}, a diagnostic benchmark for evaluating \textit{epistemic attack}, where prompts challenge the legitimacy of knowledge, values, or identity rather than simply opposing a previous answer. PPT-Bench is organized around the Philosophical Pressure Taxonomy (PPT), which defines four types of philosophical pressure: Epistemic Destabilization, Value Nullification, Authority Inversion, and...
| Authors | Steven Au, Sujit Noronha |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 9 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 9 April 2026 |
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