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Sycophancy Suppression Can Impair Rational Updating: Anti-Sycophancy Should Preserve the Ability to Update

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Aug 27, 2026 · UTC

Large language models often exhibit sycophancy, revising their answers to align with users when users push back. Such answer flips, however, can arise from different causes. One possibility is that the model simply aligns with the user's feedback in order to satisfy them. Another is that the feedback genuinely contains useful evidence, prompting the model to update its answer in a rational way. We distinguish them as Unsupported-Yielding and Rational-Updating. Prior work focuses primarily on suppressing Unsupported-Yielding, while overlooking its effect on Rational-Updating. We address this ga

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