用自洽反馈机制让大模型拒绝迎合用户,提升回答真实性。
Mitigating LLM sycophancy with RL-based fine-tuning: Bayesian Truth Serum approach

- 用模型自身输出构造群体共识,以反直觉回答获得奖励
- 在压力下答案错误率从23%降至4%,准确率升至93%
- 无需标注数据,适合缺乏标签的场景
大型语言模型常表现出‘奉承倾向’:其回答会迎合用户的已有观点,而非陈述真实认知,导致事实准确性下降并加剧虚假信息传播。本文提出一种基于强化学习微调的方法,将贝叶斯真相信函(Bayesian Truth Serum, BTS)作为组相对策略优化(GRPO)中的奖励函数来训练模型。BTS奖励那些‘出乎意料地普遍’的回答,即某答案在模型群体中出现频率高于模型自身预测的。将同一问题下多个模型输出视为一组响应者,奖励仅依赖模型自身输出,无需人工标签或偏好标注。理论上证明,在大群体极限下,奉承性回答的期望奖励严格低于诚实回答;若群体事先约定对称规则,其信息得分也无法超过诚实报告。在真假判断基准测试中,参考模型在用户压力下的答案翻转率从23%降至4%,准确率从80%提升至93%。该奖励机制优于SMART方法,与合成数据微调和精调相当,但计算开销更大,适用于标签稀缺场景。同行真相信函(Peer Truth Serum)虽不需预测报告,也能重现效果。结果表明,仅在单个GRPO组内使用基于稀有性的同伴预测奖励,即可无监督降低奉承行为,且‘稀有回答溢价’是核心驱动力。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Large language models (LLMs) frequently exhibit \emph{sycophancy}: they adapt their answers to a user's stated beliefs or preferences instead of reporting what they hold to be true, which lowers factual accuracy and can amplify misinformation. This paper proposes a methodology for mitigating sycophancy that employs the Bayesian Truth Serum (BTS), a peer-prediction mechanism, as the reward in Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to fine-tune an LLM. BTS pays an answer for being \emph{surprisingly common}, that is, more frequent among respondents than those respondents themselves predicted. We treat a group of responses from a model for one question as those respondents, so the reward is a function of the model's own outputs and fine-tuning needs neither labels nor preference annotations. We prove that in the large-group limit a sycophantic response earns strictly lower expected reward than an honest one. We also prove that if the entire group agrees in advance on a symmetric answering rule, it cannot earn a higher information score than under truthful reporting. On our true/false benchmark the reference model's answer-flip rate under user pressure decreases from 23% to 4%, and its accuracy under that pressure increases from 80% to 93%. Our reward outperforms SMART and is comparable to synthetic-data fine-tuning and to pinpoint tuning, all three of which train on labels. It spends considerably more compute in exchange, which makes it suitable when labeled data is scarce. Peer Truth Serum, which also pays a premium for a rare answer but elicits no prediction report, reproduces the effect. A peer-prediction reward computed inside a single GRPO group therefore reduces sycophancy without labels, and comparing mechanisms suggests that the premium paid for a rarer answer drives the effect.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。