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

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 20 May 2026] Playing Devil's Advocate: Off-the-Shelf Persona Vectors Rival Targeted Steering for Sycophancy Ishaan Kelkar, Nebras Alam, Vikram Kakaria, Madhur Panwar, Vasu Sharma, Maheep Chaudhary We study the effect of different persona on \textbf{sycophancy}: model's agreement with users even when the user is incorrect. The standard mitigation, Contrastive Activation Addition (CAA), derives a steering direction from labelled pairs of sycophantic and honest responses. This study evaluates whether off-the-shelf persona steering vectors, originally developed for general role-playing and not trained on sycophancy data, can serve as an alternative. In two instruction-tuned models, steering toward personas characterised by doubt or scrutiny reduces sycophancy to approximately 68\% and 98\% of CAA's effect, and, unlike CAA, maintains accuracy when the user is correct. The effect is also asymmetric: steering toward agreeable personas does not produce a mirror increase in sycophancy. Geometrically, the persona vector is largely independent of the direction of sycophancy in activation space. Collectively, these findings suggest that sycophancy is better understood as a persona-level property rather than a single steerable direction. We release our code here: this https URL. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Machine Learning (cs.LG) Cite as: arXiv:2605.21006 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2605.21006v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.21006 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Maheep Chaudhary [view email] [v1] Wed, 20 May 2026 10:43:17 UTC (189 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs cs.CL cs.LG References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)