Playing Devil's Advocate: Off-the-Shelf Persona Vectors Rival Targeted Steering for Sycophancy
Language models are often sycophantic: they agree with a user's stated opinion whether or not it is correct. Prior work has shown that this trait can be controlled by steering a model with a sycophancy persona vector (Chen et al., 2025). Such vectors, however, are extracted from data about sycophancy itself. We ask whether we can instead reuse existing vectors for general roles---Skeptic, Judge, Devil's Advocate---that were extracted without targeting sycophancy at all. On Gemma 2 27B and Qwen 3 32B, we compare these role vectors with a purpose-built Contrastive Activation Addition (CAA) sycophancy vector on a largely held-out, counterbalanced PhilPapers benchmark, using task-specific coe...
| Authors | Ishaan Kelkar, Vikram Kakaria, Nebras Alam et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 20 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 30 September 2026 |
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