Looking Again: Measuring Sycophancy in the Reasoning Chains of Multimodal Models Under Pressure
arXiv:2608.28623v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large multimodal reasoning models (LMRMs) are getting increasingly capable, primarily through generating explicit chain-of-thought reasoning before answering. In language models it has been observed that this performance often comes with sycophancy, the tendency of a model to agree with the user over the evidence. However, for LMRMs no reliable method to measure sycophancy yet exists. We bridge this gap by introducing a benchmark and dataset for evaluating LMRM sycophancy when confronted with a wrong answer from a user. Our benchmark pairs four visually grounded datasets spanning mathematical, clinical, temporal, and demographic reasoning with five pressure conditions in single-turn and multi-turn settings. We evaluate sycophancy in the final answer as well as its emergence within the reasoning chain. We find that sycophancy is prevalent under pressure, with Statement pressure eliciting the highest rates and Conviction the lowest for all models except Mistral-Small-4, and under multi-turn pressure reasoning-level sycophancy intensifies sharply in clinical visual judgement, reaching 95.7% for the most affected model. We further introduce a failure taxonomy separating reasoning-chain from answer-level sycophancy, and a complementary sentence-level taxonomy locating where in the chain drift first emerges. Our results show that sycophancy can corrupt the reasoning chain independently of the final answer, so answer-level evaluation alone is insufficient.
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[Submitted on 30 Jul 2026]
Title:Looking Again: Measuring Sycophancy in the Reasoning Chains of Multimodal Models Under Pressure
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Abstract:Large multimodal reasoning models (LMRMs) are getting increasingly capable, primarily through generating explicit chain-of-thought reasoning before answering. In language models it has been observed that this performance often comes with sycophancy, the tendency of a model to agree with the user over the evidence. However, for LMRMs no reliable method to measure sycophancy yet exists. We bridge this gap by introducing a benchmark and dataset for evaluating LMRM sycophancy when confronted with a wrong answer from a user. Our benchmark pairs four visually grounded datasets spanning mathematical, clinical, temporal, and demographic reasoning with five pressure conditions in single-turn and multi-turn settings. We evaluate sycophancy in the final answer as well as its emergence within the reasoning chain. We find that sycophancy is prevalent under pressure, with Statement pressure eliciting the highest rates and Conviction the lowest for all models except Mistral-Small-4, and under multi-turn pressure reasoning-level sycophancy intensifies sharply in clinical visual judgement, reaching 95.7% for the most affected model. We further introduce a failure taxonomy separating reasoning-chain from answer-level sycophancy, and a complementary sentence-level taxonomy locating where in the chain drift first emerges. Our results show that sycophancy can corrupt the reasoning chain independently of the final answer, so answer-level evaluation alone is insufficient.
Comments: Accepted to COLM @ AdvML-Frontiers-CoTMA
Subjects:
Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
Cite as: arXiv:2608.28623 [cs.CL]
(or arXiv:2608.28623v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.28623
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Mahir Numayeer Islam [view email] [v1] Thu, 30 Jul 2026 03:45:46 UTC (800 KB)
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