Decomposing Factual Sycophancy in Language Models: How Size and Instruction Tuning Shape Robustness
Factual sycophancy occurs when a language model abandons a correct, verifiable answer under social pressure. Because a flip occurs only when pressure toward a false answer exceeds the model's neutral preference for the truth, flip rates conflate two mechanisms: the strength of that baseline preference (truth margin), and how far pressure shifts it (manipulation sensitivity). We decompose factual sycophancy into these channels and use them to separate the effects of size and instruction tuning across 56 open-weight models spanning 0.3B-32B parameters and 13 manipulation types. We find that vulnerability is governed mainly by size, but instruction tuning changes how size acts: small instruc...
| Authors | Victor De Marez, Luna De Bruyne, Walter Daelemans |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 4 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 4 June 2026 |
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