Disentangling Robustness and Sycophancy in Multilingual LLMs

Rhitabrat Pokharel, Ameeta Agrawal

When a multilingual LLM agrees with a user's false premise, is it being sycophantic, or does it simply not know better in that language? Current research does not distinguish these cases: they record only whether the model agreed, not why. We introduce the SC-matrix, that crosses a model's competence (whether it answers correctly under no pressure) with its sycophancy (whether it maintains that answer under pressure). Our results show that (1) identical aggregate sycophancy rates can mask different failure compositions, (2) high competence in a language does not always protect against sycophancy, and (3) reasoning-oriented mitigations outperform directive-based strategies. We find that multilingual sycophancy is not a single phenomenon but a composite of different failures that require distinct diagnosis.