Constraint cost per Transformer operation in a ZK circuit — without and with lookup arguments. Softmax (275→30), LayerNorm (150→20), and GELU (400→40) dominate the budget until Lasso/LogUp replace in-circuit transcendental approximations with table lookups. Tap a row to inspect.
Softmax costs 275 ZK constraints per element vs 4 for MatMul. ZK-DeepSeek proved Transformer inference is expressible in SNARKs. Lookup arguments (Lasso, LogUp) explain how — replacing in-circuit transcendental approximations with pre-committed tables cuts nonlinear costs 10–20×.