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arXiv · 2610.11167

PIVOT: Perplexity-Informed KD-to-RL Transition Scheduling for Vertical-Domain Few-Shot Distillation

Heng Li·Yong Zhang·Ning Cheng·Zhigen Li·Yun Zhu·Yanmeng Wang·Shaojun Wang·Jing Xiao
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Abstract

Vertical-domain few-shot classification remains challenging for small language models, as limited supervision makes it difficult to acquire domain-specific decision knowledge. On-Policy Distillation (OPD) can improve teacher-guided adaptation by supervising student-generated rollouts, while GRPO-based reinforcement learning can further refine downstream predictions. However, existing KD-to-RL pipelines typically rely on globally fixed transition schedules, ignoring that different samples may require different amounts of teacher-guided acquisition before reward-driven refinement. We propose PIVOT (Perplexity-Informed Transition Optimization), a dynamic transition framework that routes samples between OPD and GRPO according to teacher-evaluated sequence perplexity. PIVOT moves low-perplexity samples to GRPO for reward-driven refinement while keeping high-perplexity samples under OPD for continued domain knowledge acquisition. Experiments on Banking77 and HWU64 show that PIVOT consistently outperforms continued OPD and globally synchronized OPD$\rightarrow$GRPO baselines under the same number of post-warm-up student optimization steps, achieving stronger downstream performance and more stable training dynamics.

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Heng Li, Yong Zhang, Ning Cheng, Zhigen Li, Yun Zhu, Yanmeng Wang, Shaojun Wang, Jing Xiao. 2026-10-08. PIVOT: Perplexity-Informed KD-to-RL Transition Scheduling for Vertical-Domain Few-Shot Distillation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11167

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