AINewsnow

No Usable Linear "Capitulation Direction" in Two Small LLMs: A Validation Protocol for Activation-Steering Claims, and a Cross-Family Behavioral Study of Sycophancy Under Pushback

This story is from 2026-09-17. It is preserved in the archive; the latest stories are on the live feed.

arXiv:2609.17550v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models frequently abandon correct answers when users push back. We study this in two small instruction-tuned models from different families, Qwen2.5-1.5B and Llama-3.2-1B, over TriviaQA: the model answers, is challenged with one of four scrip…

Read the full story at arXiv cs.CL ↗

Timeline · 1 report

  1. 2026-09-17 04:00 · arXiv cs.CL
    No Usable Linear "Capitulation Direction" in Two Small LLMs: A Validation Protocol for Activation-Steering Claims, and a Cross-Family Behavioral Study of Sycophancy Under Pushback

More stories

  1. Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-Heretic2-IQ4XS on Halogen Flash Server vs llama-server on Strix Halo: 2.3-7.7x prefill speedup with half the VRAM (+ vision works on BYO GGUF) — r/LocalLLM
  2. M2 Mac ultra128gb Qwen flash next — r/LocalLLM
  3. Multi-hour llama.cpp optimization experiments on Qwen MoE models, patches, benchmarks, and reproduction guides — r/LocalLLM
  4. Intel releases OpenVINO 2026.4 — r/LocalLLaMA
  5. M1 Max 32GB, trying to run Qwen 3.8 27B at decent speeds and context — r/LocalLLaMA
  6. I turned an asymetric pair of Tesla V100s PCIe both (16 GB + 32 GB) into a surprisingly capable local LLM lab — 1.38k prompt tok/s, 40 decode tok/s with qwen3.8 27B Q6 and Q8... — r/LocalLLaMA
  7. [Guide / Weights] Qwen 3.8 27B on Intel Arc: Why IQ quants crawl at 8 tok/s, why Q4_K outpaces sub-4bpw on Battlemage, and clean RCO GGUFs (16GB & 24GB) — r/LocalLLM
  8. My Version of Jev running locally, playing doom. — r/LocalLLM

Get the daily brief of stories like this at 6:30 every morning →