Sycophancy Suppression Can Impair Rational Updating: Anti-Sycophancy Should Preserve the Ability to Update
Large language models often exhibit sycophancy, revising their answers to align with users when users push back. Such answer flips, however, can arise from different causes. One possibility is that the model simply aligns with the user's feedback in order to satisfy them. Another is that the feedback genuinely contains useful evidence, prompting the model to update its answer in a rational way. We distinguish them as Unsupported-Yielding and Rational-Updating. Prior work focuses primarily on suppressing Unsupported-Yielding, while overlooking its effect on Rational-Updating. We address this gap with a two-turn evaluation framework that measures the two behaviors separately. Across represe...
| Authors | Huanhuan Ma, Henry Peng Zou, Chengze Li et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 27 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 27 August 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.