Steering LLMs to curb sycophancy also mutes factual agreement
The paper introduces dual-stance evaluation, testing whether activation-steering methods that suppress sycophancy also dampen agreement with true statements. Applied to Llama‑3‑8B‑Instruct, the steering direction projects equally onto both sycophantic and factual subspaces, unintentionally reducing correct answers like "the Earth is round". This reveals a fundamental limit: readable representations may not be writable.