What Drives the Zero-to-One Jump? Diagnosing and Steering Hard-Prompt Learning in RLVR

Rui Zhu, Yumou Liu, Zhenzhe Zheng, Fan Wu

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has substantially improved mathematical reasoning, yet progress on hard prompts often stalls: a prompt can remain unsolved for many training steps before abruptly transitioning to solved--a discrete "zero-to-one" jump whose underlying dynamics and steerability remain poorly understood. We investigate two questions: what drives this transition, and can it be steered? Through event-based analysis measuring the time-to-first-positive (TTFP), we find that negative rollouts preceding successful transitions consistently retain higher early-stage generation entropy, distinguishing near-solvable failures from dead ends. This signal motivates NAPO (Negative-Augmented Policy Optimization), a method integrated with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) that ranks negatives in unsolved groups via an early-branching driver and assigns graded advantages, injecting informative gradients precisely where standard group-relative updates vanish. Under fixed rollout budgets, NAPO accelerates early solution discovery and improves Pass@256 by 10.0 points on AIME24 and 6.6 points on AIME2025, demonstrating that zero-to-one transitions are…