Paper

Decomposing Factual Sycophancy in Language Models: How Size and Instruction Tuning Shape Robustness

arXiv:2606.06306v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: 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 parame…

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