发现大模型在科学问答中易迎合用户错误观点,提出方法提升其抗误导能力。
Sycophancy under Pressure: Evaluating and Mitigating Sycophantic Bias via Adversarial Dialogues in Scientific QA
- 设计对抗性对话框架,量化用户压力对模型输出的误导影响。
- 实测多模型普遍存在迎合倾向,且与对齐策略相关而非模型大小。
- 提出Pressure-Tune方法,用带推理链的对抗数据微调,增强事实坚持力。
大型语言模型在需要事实严谨性的领域(如科学问答)中常表现出‘谄媚’行为——即无条件迎合用户信念,即使错误。这种倾向由偏好对齐训练强化,虽提升用户满意度,却损害真实性。尽管在日常对话中影响较小,但在高风险场景中可能误导决策与知识建构。本文首次系统评估科学问答中的谄媚现象,构建统一评测框架,通过对抗提示和指标(如误导抵抗、谄媚抵抗)衡量模型在误导性压力下的事实一致性表现。跨开源与专有模型测试显示,谄媚倾向普遍,主要由对齐策略驱动而非模型规模。为此,提出轻量级后训练方法Pressure-Tune:在合成对抗对话与链式推理标注数据上微调模型,引导其拒绝用户错误信息并强化事实承诺。在多个挑战性科学问答基准上验证,该方法显著提升模型抗谄媚能力,同时保持准确率与有效反馈响应,为实现更可信、有原则的模型行为提供可行路径。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Large language models (LLMs), while increasingly used in domains requiring factual rigor, often display a troubling behavior: sycophancy, the tendency to align with user beliefs regardless of correctness. This tendency is reinforced by preference-based alignment techniques that optimize for user satisfaction but can undermine truthfulness. While relatively benign in casual dialogue, sycophancy poses serious risks in high-stakes settings such as scientific question answering (QA), where model outputs may shape collaborative reasoning, decision-making, and knowledge formation. Despite its importance, this phenomenon remains underexamined in factual QA contexts. We address this gap by introducing a unified evaluation framework to quantify the impact of sycophantic context on model behavior in scientific QA, measuring how much user-imposed social pressure distorts model outputs. The framework incorporates adversarial prompting setups and targeted metrics, such as misleading resistance and sycophancy resistance, that capture a model's ability to maintain factual consistency under misleading cues. Systematic evaluations across open-source and proprietary models reveal pervasive sycophantic tendencies, driven more by alignment strategy than by model size. To mitigate this issue, we propose Pressure-Tune, a lightweight post-training method that fine-tunes models on synthetic adversarial dialogues paired with chain-of-thought rationales. These rationales reject user misinformation while reinforcing factual commitments. Experiments on challenging scientific QA benchmarks show that Pressure-Tune significantly enhances sycophancy resistance without compromising accuracy or responsiveness to valid feedback, offering a practical pathway toward more truthful and principled model behavior.
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