Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently exhibit sycophancy, where they agree with a user's statement even when incorrect. While sycophancy is often treated as a single defined behavior, it can manifest in substantially distinct ways and circumstances, raising the question of whether this multi-faceted nature is reflected in its internal mechanisms. To address this gap, we dissociate the representations of sycophancy into factual and opinion subtypes -- motivated by the distinction between verifiable claims and subjective beliefs. We train linear probes and construct steering vectors on activations of one subtype and evaluate their transfer to the other subtype to measure to what extent they share representations. We find evidence that different LLMs represent these subtypes differently, with either more unified or more distinct and causally interfering representations. This method of dissociation offers a promising framework for studying the representational structure of complex model behaviors.
We propose a novel perspective for probing LLM sycophancy in a direct and neutral way, mitigating various forms of uncontrolled bias, noise, or manipulative language, deliberately injected to prompts in prior works. A key novelty of our approach is the use of an LLM-as-a-judge in a zero-sum betting game. Within this framework, sycophancy serves one individual (the user) while explicitly incurring cost on another. Comparing 11 leading models we find that while most models exhibit significant sycophantic tendencies in the common setting, in which sycophancy is self-serving to the user and incurs no cost on others, seven of the models exhibit ``moral remorse'', five of which significantly over-compensate for their sycophancy in case it explicitly harms a third party. We refer to this phenomenon as `anti-sycophancy' bias and discuss possible causes for this shift.
Large language models often align with users' beliefs at the expense of factual accuracy, a behavior known as sycophancy. Prior mechanistic studies largely treat sycophancy as a single behavioral dimension that can be uniformly amplified or suppressed. We challenge this assumption by analyzing three hypothesized modes of sycophancy across 948 social pressure situations. Although the modes produce highly similar outputs, with a text-only classifier achieving just 57.8 percent accuracy, their internal representations are perfectly linearly separable from layer 14 onward. We further find the modes emerge at different processing stages, rely on distinct attention circuitry, and fire strongest on different inputs. These results show that sycophancy is not a monolithic tendency, but a structured family of representationally and computationally distinct modes, motivating more precise measurement and intervention.
Activation steering can shift LLM behaviour, but standard evaluations do not typically test whether a sycophancy-reduction direction also suppresses agreement with factually correct statements. We introduce dual-stance evaluation, which tests both stances of each topic, and apply it to centroid-difference steering on Llama-3-8B-Instruct. We find a dissociation: the model represents sycophantic and factual agreement in geometrically distinct subspaces, yet the steering direction projects equally onto both and cannot differentially target either. The direction accordingly reduces agreement with factually correct statements (e.g. that the Earth is round) as well as sycophantic ones. All other static properties of the two activation groups are matched, suggesting the behavioural dissociation arises from generation dynamics or from finer-grained structure that residual-stream analysis cannot resolve. The pattern illustrates a general gap: representations that are readable from activations may not be writable through them.