Dual-Stance Evaluation of Sycophancy: The Structure of Agreement and the Limits of Intervention

In three linesActivation steering to reduce sycophancy in Llama-3-8B-Instruct also suppresses agreement with factually correct statements. Dual-stance evaluation reveals sycophantic and factual agreement occupy distinct geometric subspaces, yet the steering direction projects equally onto both, illustrating a gap between readable and writable representations.

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