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.