S04 — Pinpoint Tuning and Mechanistic Approaches¶
Summary¶
| Source / Database | Web (Google via WebSearch) + arXiv |
| Query terms | "pinpoint tuning sycophancy attention heads neurons selective adjustment" |
| Filters | None |
| Results returned | 10 |
| Results selected | 3 |
| Results rejected | 7 |
Selected Results¶
| Result | Title | URL | Rationale |
|---|---|---|---|
| S04-R01 | From Yes-Men to Truth-Tellers (arXiv) | https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.01658 | Primary pinpoint tuning paper |
| S04-R02 | Sycophancy Hides Linearly in the Attention Heads (arXiv) | https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16644 | Mechanistic analysis of sycophancy |
| S04-R03 | A Few Bad Neurons (arXiv) | https://arxiv.org/html/2601.18939v1 | Complementary mechanistic approach |
Rejected Results¶
| Result | Title | URL | Rationale |
|---|---|---|---|
| S04-R04 | OpenReview version (duplicate) | https://openreview.net/pdf/a8d187960199a251476c787ab3144b0ff761e4ae.pdf | Duplicate of S04-R01 |
| S04-R05 | GitHub sycophancy-interpretability | https://github.com/yellowtownhz/sycophancy-interpretability | Code repository, not paper |
| S04-R06 | ICML proceedings version | https://proceedings.mlr.press/v235/chen24u.html | Duplicate venue of S04-R01 |
| S04-R07-10 | Various | Various | Duplicate coverage or reviews |
Notes¶
This search uncovered an active mechanistic interpretability approach to sycophancy. Two papers (January 2026) show the field is converging on the idea that sycophancy can be surgically removed from specific attention heads.