{"paper":{"title":"TD-DPO: Difference-Aware Preference Optimization for Mitigating Sycophancy in Clinical Autism Intervention Dialogue","license":"http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"cs.LG","authors_text":"Chenxi Li, Gang Pan, Haifeng Li, Junhong Lai, Lin Yao, Qing Zhou, Shuzhong Lai, Yueming Wang","submitted_at":"2026-07-17T05:25:48Z","abstract_excerpt":"The sycophancy of large language models can increase the safety risk in intervention dialogue for autistic children. Supervised fine-tuning can somewhat reduce sycophancy, but relying solely on positive examples is often insufficient to identify and correct failure patterns. We observe that sycophancy behaviors can often be localized to a limited span within the model response. In this regime, sequence-level preference optimization can over-update preference-irrelevant tokens and degrade intervention ability. To address this, we propose the \\textbf{M}inimal \\textbf{E}dit \\textbf{D}ata \\textbf{"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2607.18304","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2607.18304/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}