FIGS: Evaluating Multi-Turn Sycophancy Without Penalizing Empathy

arXiv:2609.39863 · cs.AI, cs.CL · Submitted 2026-09-30 · Read on arXiv

cs.AI, cs.CL

Submitted: 2026-09-30

Updated: 2026-09-30

Comments: 64 pages, 11 figures, 29 tables. Code: https://github.com/compass-group-tue/FIGSBench ; Data: https://huggingface.co/datasets/compass-group-tue/FIGSBench

Code: https://github.com/compass-group-tue/FIGSBench

License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

Terminology

• Sycophancy — 200× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Benchmark — 40× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Archetype — 33× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Accuracy — 14× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Ablation — 9× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Frustration — 9× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Alignment — 7× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Core — 7× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Grounding — 5× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Robustness — 3× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Verification — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Abstraction — 2× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Adam — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Factual Integrity and Grounded Support — 2× in this paper
• Benchmarking — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Calibration — 1× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Consistency — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Fidelity — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Fine-Tuning — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• KV cache — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• LLM judge — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Large Language Models (LLMs) — 1× in this paper · explained in 6 episodes
• Multimodal Inputs — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Number of Flips — 1× in this paper
• Scaffolding — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes

Sources

• Sycophantic Agreement Transfers with Neutral Data via Contrastive Preference Optimization
• DeepSeek-V4: Towards Highly Efficient Million-Token Context Intelligence
• DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash: Pushing the Limits of KV Cache Compression
• The Llama 3 Herd of Models
• Kimi K3: Open Frontier Intelligence
• GPT-4o System Card
• SPINE: Measuring LLM Sycophancy under Sustained Multi-Turn Pressure
• Simple synthetic data reduces sycophancy in large language models

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