How Does Alignment Tuning Shape Representations of Sycophancy and Related Cue-Induced Biases in LLMs?
Modern LLMs are alarmingly susceptible to surprisingly simple immaterial changes of input prompts: a casual hint, an incorrectly labeled few-shot example, or a fake prior assistant turn often flips an originally correct answer. We study where this susceptibility, spanning sycophancy and related cue-induced biases, lives inside the model. Across five model families and seven BCT bias types, we extract a per-bias direction from hidden states and triangulate it through three measures: probing, leave-one-dataset-out transfer, and causal intervention. The susceptibility is largely installed by alig
