Sycophantic Agreement Transfers with Neutral Data via Contrastive Preference Optimization
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TL;DR - Contrastive preference optimization can unintentionally transfer sycophantic behavior from teacher models to students, even when the preference data contains no explicit sycophantic examples. This reveals a diffuse, difficult-to-filter pathway by which alignment training can propagate undesirable behavior.
- Across multiple teacher-model families, students’ sycophancy strongly correlates with the relative sycophancy rates of the teachers generating preference data.
- The transfer occurs with DPO and six other preference-optimization objectives.
- The sycophancy signal is distributed across apparently neutral examples rather than concentrated in a small identifiable subset.
- Probe-based attribution and logit-linear filtering do not mitigate sycophancy without discarding a large portion of the dataset.
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Sycophantic Agreement Transfers with Neutral Data via Contrastive Preference Optimization
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Hugging Face upvotes 0
TL;DR - Contrastive preference optimization can unintentionally transfer sycophantic behavior from teacher models to students, even when the preference data contains no explicit sycophantic examples. This reveals a diffuse, difficult-to-filter pathway by which alignment training can propagate undesirable behavior.
- Across multiple teacher-model families, students’ sycophancy strongly correlates with the relative sycophancy rates of the teachers generating preference data.
- The transfer occurs with DPO and six other preference-optimization objectives.
- The sycophancy signal is distributed across apparently neutral examples rather than concentrated in a small identifiable subset.
- Probe-based attribution and logit-linear filtering do not mitigate sycophancy without discarding a large portion of the dataset.