Recovering Agentic Sovereignty: Mitigating the Consensus Paradox via Contrastive Epistemic Decoding

arXiv cs.AISeptember 23, 2026en

arXiv:2609.25570v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit a parametric vulnerability to adversarial swarm consensus. To mitigate this sycophancy, we introduce Contrastive Epistemic Decoding (CED), a zero-shot inference intervention. Unlike standard Contrastive Decoding (CD) which relies on a weaker secondary model, CED utilizes a dual forward-pass on a single architecture to isolate conformity bias. By introducing a novel asymmetric, zero-bounded probability clamp and discrete top-k truncation mask, CED mathematically suppresses toxic consensus tokens without causing grammatical collapse. Evaluated across 7,200 paired trajectories on complex benchmarks (GAIA, SWE-b

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