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SoftDTW-CUDA-Torch: Memory-Efficient GPU-Accelerated Soft Dynamic Time Warping for PyTorch

Machine Learning 2026-02-20 v1

Abstract

We present softdtw-cuda-torch, an open-source PyTorch library for computing Soft Dynamic Time Warping (SoftDTW) on GPUs. Our implementation addresses three key limitations of existing GPU implementations of SoftDTW: a hard sequence-length cap of 1024, numerical instability in the backward pass for small smoothing parameters, and excessive GPU memory consumption from materializing pairwise distance tensors. We introduce (1) tiled anti-diagonal kernel execution that removes the sequence-length constraint, (2) a log-space back-ward pass that prevents floating-point overflow, and (3) a fused distance-computation mode that eliminates the O(BN M ) intermediate distance tensor, achieving up to 98% memory reduction compared to prior work. The library supports arbitrary sequence lengths, full PyTorch autograd integration, and Soft-DTW Barycenter computation. Code is available at https://github.com/BGU-CS-VIL/sdtw-cuda-torch.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.17206,
  title  = {SoftDTW-CUDA-Torch: Memory-Efficient GPU-Accelerated Soft Dynamic Time Warping for PyTorch},
  author = {Ron Shapira Weber and Oren Freifeld},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.17206},
  year   = {2026}
}

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Technical Report

R2 v1 2026-07-01T10:42:39.980Z