finding

active

finding:sycophantic-steering-delta-of-42-46-p-0-001-at-stage1-step99000-415b-tokens-in-olmo-3

Sycophantic steering delta of +42.46 (p<0.001) at stage1-step99000 (415B tokens) in OLMo-3

Peak same-checkpoint sycophantic steering result in OLMo-3 pretraining

Source paper

extracted_from

Tracing Persona Vectors Through LLM Pretraining

(2026) · Viktor Moskvoretskii · Dominik Glandorf · Jorge Medina Moreira · Tanja Käser +1

Neighborhood — ranked by edge-count

Papers (1)

paper

Tracing Persona Vectors Through LLM Pretraining
mentions

Related by similarity (8)

cosine ≥ 0.65 · no typed edge

Entities in the same semantic neighborhood but without a typed relation to this one — candidates for new edges or unrecognized duplicates.

Evil persona steering delta of +9.69 (p=0.011) at stage1-step3000 (12.6B tokens) in OLMo-3finding0.858
First significant evil persona steering result; establishes emergence at 0.22% pretraining
Impolite steering delta of +38.09 (p<0.001) at OLMo-3 main checkpointfinding0.843
Peak impolite same-checkpoint steering result at fully pretrained OLMo-3
Coherence scores remain between 60-70 across all cross-domain steering combinations in OLMo-3finding0.765
Shows persona steering largely preserves response quality across evaluation domains
PM achieves overall SJT steerability Phi=9.6 on gemma-3-12b-it vs MDS=8.7 and P2=8.3finding0.754
Per-model steerability comparison from Table 4
P12 (High C+A) under activation steering (ASR 0.818) exceeds the Dark Triad composite P24 (ASR 0.662) on Llama-3.1-8B, the most AS-dangerous multi-trait profile.finding0.740
Demonstrates the paradox magnitude relative to semantically dangerous personas
P12 (High C+A) reaches 60.0% ASR under activation steering on DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B, the highest of any steered persona and exceeding Dark Triad P24 (25.6%), replicating the prosocial paradox.finding0.736
Replication of prosocial paradox on reasoning model
Under activation steering on Llama-3.1-8B, inter-persona variance (0.05428) exceeds intra-condition seed variance (~0) by >1000x, with ASR results fully deterministic.finding0.733
Variance decomposition showing AS results are dominated by persona identity
Sycophancy persona vector decomposes into stylistic features: affirmative phrases (F121978, TES=98.6), advertising language (F86620, TES=88.0), and encouraging language (F39874, TES=87.2)finding0.730
SAE analysis shows sycophancy is primarily stylistic rather than content-based