← 研踪 PaperTrailACL Anthology · ACL 2026:acl:2026.acl-long.1126 · 记录 #1
Good Arguments Against the People Pleasers: How Reasoning Mitigates (Yet Masks) LLM Sycophancy
来源日期（仅到月份） 2026-07
来源记录日期 2026-07
雷达观测 2026-11-01 21:56
摘要
Alignment techniques often inadvertently induce sycophancy in LLMs. While prior studies studied this behaviour in direct-answer settings, the role of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning remains under-explored: does it serve as a logical constraint that mitigates sycophancy, or a tool for post-hoc rationalization that masks it? We evaluate a range of models across objective and subjective tasks to investigate the issue.Results show that reasoning generally reduces sycophancy in final decisions but also masks sycophancy in some samples, where models construct deceptive justifications through logical inconsistencies, calculation errors, and one-sided arguments etc. Furthermore, LLMs are more prone to sycophancy in subjective tasks and under authority-bias. Our mechanistic analysis reveals that the tendency of sycophancy in LLMs is dynamic during the reasoning process rather than being pre-determined at the input.
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记录 #1 · 2026-07 · 最新观测版本
Good Arguments Against the People Pleasers: How Reasoning Mitigates (Yet Masks) LLM Sycophancy
Alignment techniques often inadvertently induce sycophancy in LLMs. While prior studies studied this behaviour in direct-answer settings, the role of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning remains under-explored: does it serve as a logical constraint that mitigates sycophancy, or a tool for post-hoc rationalization that masks it? We evaluate a range of models across objective and subjective tasks to investigate the issue.Results show that reasoning generally reduces sycophancy in final decisions but also masks sycophancy in some samples, where models construct deceptive justifications through logical inconsistencies, calculation errors, and one-sided arguments etc. Furthermore, LLMs are more prone to sycophancy in subjective tasks and under authority-bias. Our mechanistic analysis reveals that the tendency of sycophancy in LLMs is dynamic during the reasoning process rather than being pre-determined at the input.
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