Playing Devil's Advocate: Off-the-Shelf Persona Vectors Rival Targeted Steering for Sycophancy

arXiv:2605.21006v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Language models are often sycophantic: they agree with a user's stated opinion whether or not it is correct. Prior work has shown that this trait can be controlled by steering a model with a sycophancy persona vector (Chen et al., 2025). Such vectors, however, are extracted from data about sycophancy itself. We ask whether we can instead reuse existing vectors for general roles---Skeptic, Judge, Devil's Advocate---that were extracted without targeting sycophancy at all. On Gemma 2 27B and Qwen 3 32B, we compare these role vectors with a purpo

This content is for informational purposes only and is not professional advice. Specifications, prices, plan tiers, and features change frequently and may differ from what is shown here; verify current details on the manufacturer's or company's official page before purchasing. Ratings are based on analysis of published documentation, not independent lab testing.