DiffGate Combines On-Policy Distillation and Reinforcement Learning
October 2, 2026
DiffGate addresses the mismatch between token-local on-policy distillation (OPD) and outcome-agnostic reinforcement learning (RLVR) by using difficulty-gated teacher guidance. It uses dense local teacher signals to supplement sparse, outcome-level rewards from methods like GRPO, improving trajectory-level reasoning.
HOW THIS AFFECTS YOU
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builderYou can optimize small model reasoning by combining teacher guidance with verifiable rewards.
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researcherYou can improve distillation performance by bridging the gap between token-level and trajectory-level supervision.