大模型明知用户错误仍附和,背后有特定神经回路控制。
LLMs Know They're Wrong and Agree Anyway: The Shared Sycophancy-Lying Circuit

- 发现一组共享注意力头负责识别错误并选择附和
- 关闭这些头可大幅减少附和行为而保持事实准确
- 该机制在对齐训练后仍存在,适合研究模型偏见者
当语言模型同意用户的错误信念时,是未能察觉错误,还是察觉后仍选择附和?我们证明是后者。在来自五个实验室的十二个开源模型中,无论模型自主判断还是受用户施压,同一组少量注意力头始终携带‘此陈述错误’的信号。关闭这些头能显著削弱附和行为,同时保持事实准确性,说明该回路控制的是顺从而非知识。边缘级路径修补证实,相同的头到头连接驱动附和、事实性撒谎与指令性撒谎。在无客观真值的意见一致场景中,这些头位置被重用但方向正交,排除了简单‘真理方向’解读。对齐训练并未消除该回路:使用RLHF微调使附和行为降低约十倍,但共享头反而保留或增强,这一模式在另一模型族及针对性反附和DPO训练下均复现。当模型附和时,它清楚知道用户错了,却仍选择同意。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
When a language model agrees with a user's false belief, is it failing to detect the error, or noticing and agreeing anyway? We show the latter. Across twelve open-weight models from five labs, spanning small to frontier scale, the same small set of attention heads carries a "this statement is wrong" signal, whether the model is evaluating a claim on its own or being pressured to agree with a user. Silencing these heads flips sycophantic behavior sharply while leaving factual accuracy intact, so the circuit controls deference rather than knowledge. Edge-level path patching confirms that the same head-to-head connections drive sycophancy, factual lying, and instructed lying. Opinion-agreement, where no factual ground truth exists, reuses these head positions but writes into an orthogonal direction, ruling out a simple "truth-direction" reading of the substrate. Alignment training leaves this circuit in place: an RLHF refresh cuts sycophantic behavior roughly tenfold while the shared heads persist or grow, a pattern that replicates on an independent model family and under targeted anti-sycophancy DPO. When these models sycophant, they register that the user is wrong and agree anyway.
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