# DTO: a Differentiable Training Objective for Effective Counterfactual Story Rewriting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24885 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.24885/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Categorical Reparameterization with Gumbel-Softmax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01144/) (2016)
- [A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08771/) (2018)
- [BLEURT: Learning Robust Metrics for Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04696/) (2020)
- [COMET: A Neural Framework for MT Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09025/) (2020)
- [BARTScore: Evaluating Generated Text as Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11520/) (2021)
- [A Corpus and Evaluation Framework for Deeper Understanding of Commonsense Stories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01696/) (2016)
- [Harnessing the Power of LLMs in Practice: A Survey on ChatGPT and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13712/) (2023)
- [Contrastive Preference Optimization: Pushing the Boundaries of LLM Performance in Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08417/) (2024)
- [Abductive Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05739/) (2019)
- [Why We Need New Evaluation Metrics for NLG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06875/) (2017)
- [Can Large Language Models Infer Causation from Correlation?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05836/) (2023)
- [Backpropagation through the Void: Optimizing control variates for black-box gradient estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00123/) (2017)
- [Counterfactual Story Reasoning and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04076/) (2019)
- [Back to the Future: Unsupervised Backprop-based Decoding for Counterfactual and Abductive Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05906/) (2020)
- [BERTTune: Fine-Tuning Neural Machine Translation with BERTScore](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02208/) (2021)
- [Don't Take It Literally: An Edit-Invariant Sequence Loss for Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15078/) (2021)
- [Towards Understanding How Machines Can Learn Causal Overhypotheses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08353/) (2022)
- [Sketch and Customize: A Counterfactual Story Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00929/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Editing for Counterfactual Stories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05417/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Counterfactual story rewriting is a natural language processing task that requires updating an existing story to reflect a chosen alternative event, yet preserving all the unaffected storyline elements and overall coherence. While large language models have recently made remarkable progress on this task, it still remains challenging since the required modifications are typically very small in size and highly localized. As a consequence, models trained in a conventional manner with the maximum-likelihood training objective tend to overlook these nuances. At the same time, more sophisticated training approaches based on reinforcement learning are notoriously slow and difficult to set up. For these reasons, our paper proposes a novel, differentiable training objective (DTO) that directly optimizes for the requisite counterfactual improvements. In our approach, a transformer model is fine-tuned via end-to-end backpropagation against a fully differentiable loss function that jointly rewards (i) fidelity to the reference rewrite and (ii) semantic consistency with the source narrative. The empirical evaluation on the TimeTravel and ART datasets shows that the proposed DTO approach has been able to surpass a maximum-likelihood baseline and a preference-based approach, and perform competitively against two contemporary large language models in all evaluation metrics. These findings substantiate the effectiveness of task-specific differentiable objectives for nuanced, controlled text-generation tasks.