Gated Activation Steering for Reducing Sycophancy & Hallucination in Medical Question Answering

arXiv cs.AIAugust 26, 2026en

arXiv:2608.23666v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sycophancy and hallucination are persistent failure modes of Large Language Models (LLMs) across domains. However, it becomes particularly consequential in clinical question answering, where responses must remain grounded in the provided context and robust to user pressure. Hallucination can introduce information that is unsupported by the context, while sycophancy can cause a model to abandon a previously correct answer when challenged by the user. Existing approaches, such as prompt-based safeguards and always-on activation steering, often address these behaviors separately or apply interventions broadly across turns, which can unnecessarily

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