JOLT Atlas

JOLT Atlas is a zero-knowledge machine learning (zkML) framework that extends the JOLT proving system to support ML inference verification from ONNX models.

Made with ❤️ by ICME Labs.

Overview

JOLT Atlas enables practical zero-knowledge machine learning by leveraging Just One Lookup Table (JOLT) technology. Traditional circuit-based approaches are prohibitively expensive when representing non-linear functions like ReLU and SoftMax. Lookups eliminate the need for circuit representation entirely.

In JOLT Atlas, we eliminate the complexity that plagues other approaches: no quotient polynomials, no byte decomposition, no grand products, no permutation checks, and most importantly — no complicated circuits.

Our core ethos is to reduce commitment costs via sumcheck while committing only to small-value polynomials.

Examples

Examples live in jolt-atlas-core/examples/ and demonstrate end-to-end prove → verify flows for various ONNX models.

GPT-2

GPT-2 proof and verification flow.

cargo run --release --package jolt-atlas-core --example gpt2

nanoGPT

A ~0.25M-parameter GPT model (4 transformer layers). Loads the ONNX graph, generates a SNARK proof of inference, and verifies it.

cargo run --release --package jolt-atlas-core --example nanoGPT

Transformer (self-attention)

Single self-attention block proof.

cargo run --release --package jolt-atlas-core --example transformer

MiniGPT / MicroGPT

Smaller GPT variants useful for quick iteration and debugging.

cargo run --release --package jolt-atlas-core --example minigpt
cargo run --release --package jolt-atlas-core --example microgpt

Benchmarks

System specs: MacBook Pro M3, 16GB RAM

GPT-2 (125M params)

GPT-2 is a 125-million-parameter transformer model from OpenAI.

JOLT Atlas

Stage	Wall clock
Proving/verifying key generation (setup_prover)	1.003 s
Witness + commitment phase (ONNXProof::commit_witness_polynomials)	0.762 s
IOP proving (ONNXProof::iop)	5.997 s
Reduction opening proof (excluding HyperKZG::prove)	1.899 s
HyperKZG prove (HyperKZG::prove)	2.392 s
Proof time (ONNXProof::prove)	14.889 s
Verify time (ONNXProof::verify)	1.038 s
End-to-end total (setup_prover + prove + verify)	16.930 s

nanoGPT (~0.25M params, 4 transformer layers)

nanoGPT is the standard workload we use for cross-project comparison. It is a ~250k-parameter GPT model with 4 transformer layers.

JOLT Atlas:

Stage	Wall clock
Verifying key generation (setup_verifier)	<0.001 s
Proving key generation (setup_prover)	0.263 s
Proof time (ONNXProof::prove)	2.288 s
Verify time (ONNXProof::verify)	0.127 s
End-to-end total (setup_prover + prove + verify)	2.678 s

ezkl on the same model (source):

Stage	Wall clock
Verifying key generation	192 s
Proving key generation	212 s
Proof time	237 s
Verify time	0.34 s

JOLT Atlas produces a proof for nanoGPT in ~2.29 s versus ezkl's ~237 s proof time (not counting their 400+ s of key generation). That is roughly a 104× speed-up on proof generation alone.

How to reproduce locally

# from repo root
cargo run --release --package jolt-atlas-core --example gpt2

Add -- --trace for Chrome Tracing JSON output (view in chrome://tracing), or -- --trace-terminal for timing printed to the terminal.

Getting Started

GPT-2 (first run)

GPT-2 uses a Hugging Face–hosted ONNX model that is not checked into the repo. A helper script downloads and prepares it automatically.

1. Clone the repository.
2. Install Rust and Cargo.
3. Download the model:

# Create a virtual environment (one-time)
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate

# Run the download script
python scripts/download_gpt2.py

This exports GPT-2 via Hugging Face Optimum into atlas-onnx-tracer/models/gpt2/ and copies model.onnx → network.onnx.

4. Test the model (trace only, no proof):

cargo run --release --package atlas-onnx-tracer --example gpt2

You should see the model graph printed and an output shape like [1, 16, 65536] (vocab size 50257 padded to the next power of two).

5. Prove & verify GPT-2:

cargo run --release --package jolt-atlas-core --example gpt2

A successful run prints Proof verified successfully!.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the Jolt team for their foundational work. We are standing on the shoulders of giants.