Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models

Mrinank Sharma, Meg Tong, Tomasz Korbak, David Duvenaud, Amanda Askell, Samuel R. Bowman, Esin DURMUS, Zac Hatfield-Dodds, Scott R Johnston, Shauna M Kravec, Timothy Maxwell, Sam McCandlish, Kamal Ndousse, Oliver Rausch, Nicholas Schiefer, Da Yan, Miranda Zhang, Ethan Perez

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Keywords: AI safety, language models, sycophancy, human feedback, RLHF

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Abstract: Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a popular technique for training high-quality AI assistants. However, RLHF may also encourage model responses that match user beliefs over truthful responses, a behavior known as sycophancy. We investigate the prevalence of sycophancy in RLHF-trained models and whether human preference judgments are responsible. We first demonstrate that five state-of-the-art AI assistants consistently exhibit sycophancy behavior across four varied free-form text-generation tasks. To understand if human preferences drive this broadly observed behavior of RLHF models, we analyze existing human preference data. We find that when a response matches a user's views, it is more likely to be preferred. Moreover, both humans and preference models (PMs) prefer convincingly-written sycophantic responses over correct ones a non-negligible fraction of the time. Optimizing model outputs against PMs also sometimes sacrifices truthfulness in favor of sycophancy. Overall, our results indicate that sycophancy is a general behavior of RLHF models, likely driven in part by human preference judgments favoring sycophantic responses.

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Primary Area: societal considerations including fairness, safety, privacy

Submission Number: 2669