Off-the-shelf persona vectors are near-orthogonal to sycophancy yet reduce it

measured in 1 paper

Kelkar et al. measure the geometry between generic off-the-shelf persona/role steering vectors and a targeted CAA sycophancy direction in Gemma-2-27B-Instruct and Qwen3-32B [kelkar-etal-2026-devils-advocate-persona-vectors-sycophancy] All role vectors are nearly orthogonal to the CAA direction (|cos|<0.17), with the cosine sign flipping between the two models [kelkar-etal-2026-devils-advocate-persona-vectors-sycophancy] Injecting critical/skeptic-persona vectors reduces sycophancy to 68-98% of CAA's own effect without ever using sycophancy labels [kelkar-etal-2026-devils-advocate-persona-vectors-sycophancy] Steering toward agreeable personas does not produce a mirror-symmetric increase in sycophancy, an asymmetric direction-behavior relationship [kelkar-etal-2026-devils-advocate-persona-vectors-sycophancy]

Structure

Linear Direction

Context

off-the-shelf vs. targeted steering vectors, near-orthogonality between persona and sycophancy directions, cross-model cosine sign flip, asymmetric steering effect

Confirmed in models

Gemma 2 27B Instruct · Gemma, Qwen3-32B · Qwen

Method

Geometric analysis, Causal interventions (steering)

Papers

Playing Devil's Advocate: Off-the-Shelf Persona Vectors Rival Targeted Steering for Sycophancy — Kelkar, Ishaan, Alam, Nebras, Kakaria, Vikram, Panwar, Madhur, Sharma, Vasu, Chaudhary, Maheep2026 · arXiv:2605.21006