Sycophantic Anchors: Localizing and Quantifying User Agreement in Reasoning Models
Jacek Duszenko, Przemyslaw Kazienko Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, Jan Kocon Wroclaw University of Science and Technology
原文摘要
Reasoning models frequently agree with incorrect user suggestions - a behavior known as sycophancy. However, it is unclear where in the reasoning trace this agreement originates and how strong the commitment is. We introduce sycophantic anchors - sentences identified via counterfactual analysis that commit models to user agreement. Across four reasoning models spanning three architecture families (Llama, Qwen, Falcon-hybrid) and 1.5B - 8B parameters, we analyze over 200,000 counterfactual rollouts and show that linear probes reliably detect sycophantic anchors (74 - 85% balanced accuracy), outperforming text-only baselines at high commitment levels -confirming they capture internal states beyond surface vocabulary. Regressors further predict commitment strength from activations (R^2 up to 0.74). We observe a consistent asymmetry: sycophancy leaves a stronger mechanistic footprint than correct reasoning. We also find that sycophancy builds gradually during generation rather than being determined by the prompt. These findings enable sentence-level detection and quantification of model misalignment mid-inference.
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop) · 2026 · 正式发表