Beacon: Single-Turn Diagnosis and Mitigation of Latent Sycophancy in Large Language Models

In three linesBeacon is a diagnostic benchmark measuring sycophancy (bias toward user agreement) across 12 SOTA models. Authors decompose this bias into stable linguistic and affective sub-biases, proposing prompt-level and activation-level interventions to modulate them. Sycophancy emerges from a structural trade-off between truthfulness and polite submission.

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