Gumbel noise steering

Gumbel Machine: Counterfactual Student Writing Generation via Gumbel Noise Steering

The paper introduces the Gumbel Machine, a modular framework for generating counterfactual text that improves student writing while preserving similarity to the original. Central to the approach is β-Hindsight control, a controlled decoding algorithm that uses Gumbel noise as a tunable similarity mechanism during LLM generation. Experiments on student writing datasets show the method produces outputs that are both rubric-consistent and close to the reference text. The approach is positioned as more flexible and practically applicable than prior domain-specific counterfactual generation methods.