Playing Devil's Advocate: Off-the-Shelf Persona Vectors Rival Targeted Steering for Sycophancy
Authors: Ishaan Kelkar, Nebras Alam, Vikram Kakaria et al.
Summary
arXiv:2605. 21006v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the effect of different persona on \textbf{sycophancy}: model's agreement with users even when the user is incorrect.
Relevance
Read next because Playing Devil's Advocate: Off-the-Shelf Persona Vectors Rival Targeted Steering for Sycophancy overlaps with clean result "LoRA persona trained on alone emits at 23.5% when a co-trained partner learns ..., vs 0% control on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct (MODERATE confidence)", clean result "Leakage rate is a usable signal for recovering trigger-shaped phrases on Gaperon-1125-1B without knowing the hidden trigger itself (MODERATE confidence)", clean result "Language-mismatch LoRA SFT on Qwen2.5-7B leaks the trained completion language into bystander directives the model was never trained on, absent under same-language SFT (LOW confidence)". Matching terms: code, text, persona, rect, under, evil, correct, eval. Source: arxiv cs.AI (Artificial Intelligence).
Abstract
arXiv:2605.21006v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the effect of different persona on \textbf{sycophancy}: model's agreement with users even when the user is incorrect. The standard mitigation, Contrastive Activation Addition (CAA), derives a steering direction from labelled pairs of sycophantic and honest responses. This study evaluates whether off-the-shelf persona steering vectors, originally developed for general role-playing and not trained on sycophancy data, can serve as an alternative. In two instruction-tuned models, steering toward personas characterised by doubt or scrutiny reduces sycophancy to approximately $68%$ and $98%$ of CAA's effect, and, unlike CAA, maintains accuracy when the user is correct. The effect is also asymmetric: steering toward agreeable personas does not produce a mirror increase in sycophancy. Geometrically, the persona vector is largely independent of the direction of sycophancy in activation space. Collectively, these findings suggest that sycophancy is better understood as a persona-level property rather than a single steerable direction. We release our code here: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Sycophancy-Steering-9DF0/.