S02¶


Research	R0040 — RLHF Alternatives
Run	2026-03-28
Query	Q002
Search	S02

WebSearch — Approaches to reducing sycophancy in LLMs

Summary¶

Field	Value
Source/Database	WebSearch
Query terms	reducing sycophancy in language models RLHF alternatives approaches
Filters	None
Results returned	10
Results selected	3
Results rejected	7

Selected Results¶

Result	Title	URL	Rationale
S02-R01	Sycophancy in LLMs: Causes and Mitigations (Malmqvist survey)	https://arxiv.org/html/2411.15287v1	Comprehensive survey of causes and mitigations
S02-R02	From Yes-Men to Truth-Tellers: Pinpoint Tuning	https://arxiv.org/html/2409.01658v3	Mechanistic intervention for sycophancy
S02-R03	Simple Synthetic Data Reduces Sycophancy (Wei et al.)	https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.03958	Data-level mitigation approach

Rejected Results¶

Result	Title	URL	Rationale
S02-R04	Beacon: Diagnosis and Mitigation of Latent Sycophancy	https://arxiv.org/html/2510.16727	Narrower scope — specific technique rather than overview
S02-R05	Towards Understanding Sycophancy (duplicate)	https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.13548	Already captured in S01
S02-R06	How RLHF Amplifies Sycophancy (duplicate)	https://arxiv.org/html/2602.01002	Already captured in S01
S02-R07	Sycophancy Whitepaper (Desai)	https://jinaldesai.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/AI_Sycophancy_Whitepaper_JinalDesai.pdf	White paper, not peer-reviewed
S02-R08	Towards Understanding Sycophancy (OpenReview duplicate)	https://openreview.net/forum?id=tvhaxkMKAn	Already captured in S01
S02-R09	LLM Behaviors with Model-Written Evaluations	https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yRAo2KEGWenKYZG9K/discovering-language-model-behaviors-with-model-written	Tangential — evaluation methodology, not mitigation
S02-R10	Sycophancy in LLMs (Springer)	https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-92611-2_5	Same Malmqvist paper as S02-R01 (Springer version)

Notes¶

This search targeted mitigation approaches specifically. The Malmqvist survey proved most valuable as it categorizes the full landscape of sycophancy causes and mitigations.