Sycophantic Praise: Evaluating Excessive Praise in Language Models
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Computer Science > Computation and Language
Title:Sycophantic Praise: Evaluating Excessive Praise in Language Models
Abstract:Sycophancy in language models is typically studied as excessive agreement or validation, while explicit praise and flattery have received comparatively little attention. We argue that sycophantic praise is a distinct alignment problem that cannot be reliably measured using current methods. We introduce a parameterized framework that measures whether praise is excessive relative to contribution quality and expected user ability. We show that our framework substantially outperforms generic LLM judges in agreement with human annotations, and that sycophantic praise occurs far more frequently in social and interpretive domains than in objective reasoning settings. Together, these findings position praise calibration as a distinct alignment challenge.
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2606.07441 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2606.07441v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.07441
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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