Tracing mechanisms of sycophantic agreement in language models
Sycophantic agreement in language models refers to the tendency to overly affirm a user's stated beliefs or preferences, often at the expense of factual accuracy. Although it is widely recognized as an alignment failure, its underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. In this work, we use causal mediation analysis to identify the mechanisms behind sycophantic agreement. We show that a stated opinion is incorporated into the residual stream of the final prompt token early, where it biases subsequent answer retrieval. A sparse set of early attention heads carries this opinion signal. Ablating these heads substantially reduces sycophancy while leaving factual accuracy largely intact. The...
| Authors | Sixing Chen, Zhuofan Josh Ying, Logan Riggs Smith et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 21 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 21 September 2026 |
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