Sycophantic Praise: Evaluating Excessive Praise in Language Models
Sycophancy in language models is typically studied as excessive agreement or validation, while explicit praise and flattery have received comparatively little attention. We argue that sycophantic praise is a distinct alignment problem that cannot be reliably measured using current methods. We introduce a parameterized framework that measures whether praise is excessive relative to contribution quality and expected user ability. We show that our framework substantially outperforms generic LLM judges in agreement with human annotations, and that sycophantic praise occurs far more frequently in social and interpretive domains than in objective reasoning settings. Together, these findings pos...
| Authors | Daniel Vennemeyer, Phan Anh Duong, Meryl Ye et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 5 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 5 June 2026 |
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