Suppressing Pressure, Amplifying Evidence: Self-Guided Attention Steering to Mitigate Sycophancy and Stubbornness

Excerpt

arXiv:2610.04329v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable language models should resist unsupported user pressure while effectively using objective contextual information. However, models may exhibit sycophancy by yielding to unsupported user pressure or contextual stubbornness by failing to update their answers when relevant contextual information warrants revision. Evaluating interventions for these failures separately can obscure whether mitigating one failure exacerbates the other. To assess