# LLM-guided headline rewriting for clickability enhancement without clickbait

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.22459 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22459/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 18 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Plug and Play Language Models: A Simple Approach to Controlled Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02164/) (2019)
- [CTRL: A Conditional Transformer Language Model for Controllable Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05858/) (2019)
- [DExperts: Decoding-Time Controlled Text Generation with Experts and Anti-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03023/) (2021)
- [GeDi: Generative Discriminator Guided Sequence Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.06367/) (2020)
- [FUDGE: Controlled Text Generation With Future Discriminators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05218/) (2021)
- [Stop Clickbait: Detecting and Preventing Clickbaits in Online News Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.09786/) (2016)
- [The Clickbait Challenge 2017: Towards a Regression Model for Clickbait Strength](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.10847/) (2018)
- [Clickbait Detection via Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09597/) (2023)
- [Click it or Leave it: Detecting and Spoiling Clickbait with Informativeness Measures and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18171/) (2026)
- [An Interpretable Benchmark for Clickbait Detection and Tactic Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.10937/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Clinical Communication Processing with Models Trained on LLM-Generated Synthetic Data: A Structured Survey and Novel Application Case Studies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05993/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Enhancing reader engagement while preserving informational fidelity is a central challenge in controllable text generation for news media. Optimizing news headlines for reader engagement is often conflated with clickbait, resulting in exaggerated or misleading phrasing that undermines editorial trust. We frame clickbait not as a separate stylistic category, but as an extreme outcome of disproportionate amplification of otherwise legitimate engagement cues. Based on this view, we formulate headline rewriting as a controllable generation problem, where specific engagement-oriented linguistic attributes are selectively strengthened under explicit constraints on semantic faithfulness and proportional emphasis. We present a guided headline rewriting framework built on a large language model (LLM) that uses the Future Discriminators for Generation (FUDGE) paradigm for inference-time control. The LLM is steered by two auxiliary guide models: (1) a clickbait scoring model that provides negative guidance to suppress excessive stylistic amplification, and (2) an engagement-attribute model that provides positive guidance aligned with target clickability objectives. Both guides are trained on neutral headlines drawn from a curated real-world news corpus. At the same time, clickbait variants are generated synthetically by rewriting these original headlines using an LLM under controlled activation of predefined engagement tactics. By adjusting guidance weights at inference time, the system generates headlines along a continuum from neutral paraphrases to more engaging yet editorially acceptable formulations. The proposed framework provides a principled approach for studying the trade-off between attractiveness, semantic preservation, and clickbait avoidance, and supports responsible LLM-based headline optimization in journalistic settings.