The graph in the readme is outdated, you can see the version with Torch/CuDNN v4 here: http://autumnai.com/deep-learning-benchmarks

And I don't believe the first point counts as deceptive; the bars are ordered by Forward ms, not by the sum of Forward and Backward. In both CuDNN v3 and v4, Leaf is faster than Torch by that metric (25 vs 28 for v4, 31 vs 33 for v3).