[Paper] Sycophantic Praise: Evaluating Excessive Praise in Language Models
Source: arXiv - 2606.07441v1
Overview
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.
Key Contributions
This paper presents research in the following areas:
- cs.CL
Methodology
Please refer to the full paper for detailed methodology.
Practical Implications
This research contributes to the advancement of cs.CL.
Authors
- Daniel Vennemeyer
- Phan Anh Duong
- Meryl Ye
- Ruihong Huang
- Tianyu Jiang
Paper Information
- arXiv ID: 2606.07441v1
- Categories: cs.CL
- Published: June 5, 2026
- PDF: Download PDF