Overview

Graph matching studies how to align nodes and edges across graphs, from finding exact isomorphisms and common subgraphs to estimating graph edit distance or matching noisy, partially observed structures. Approaches include combinatorial search and convex relaxations, optimal-transport methods such as Sinkhorn and Gromov–Wasserstein, and learned models using graph neural networks, attention, or semantic and geometric cues. Applications range from molecular comparison and scene registration to robotics, image retrieval, and structured-data evaluation. A central tension is achieving accurate, globally consistent matches while scaling to large graphs and generalizing across domains, especially when correspondences are ambiguous or supervision is limited.

Latest papers

35 papers4 papers in the last four weeks, down 33% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

Mar 24, 2026

Sharp Statistical Thresholds for Attributed Gaussian Graph Matching

We investigate the problem of matching networks where both edge weights and node features are correlated following a specific node correspondence. While prior work has established sharp thresholds for matching either graphs or features individually, the joint setting has been significantly less explored. In this study, we derive precise information-theoretic thresholds for exact recovery, almost-exact recovery, and partial recovery of the underlying alignment. These are expressed in terms of graph and feature correlation strengths, the number of nodes, and the dimension of the features. Interestingly, whereas an all-or-nothing phase transition is observed in the standard graph-matching scenario, the inclusion of contextual information at the node level introduces a richer structure: the exact-recovery threshold separates from the shared threshold for almost-exact and partial recovery. Closing gaps left by prior works, we provide a sharp characterization of the thresholds governing how structural and contextual information interact in graph matching, and thereby establish a benchmark for designing efficient algorithms in the high-dimensional setting.
Mar 19, 2026

Breaking Hard Isomorphism Benchmarks with DRESS

DRESS is a deterministic, parameter-free framework for structural graph refinement that iteratively refines the structural similarity of edges in a graph to produce a canonical fingerprint: a real-valued edge vector, obtained by converging a nonlinear dynamical system to its unique fixed point. ΔΔ-DRESS is a member of the DRESS family of graph fingerprints that applies a single level of vertex deletion. We test it on a benchmark of 51,813 distinct graphs across 34 hard families, including the complete Spence collection of strongly regular graphs (43,703 SRGs, 12 families), four additional SRG families (8,015 graphs), and 18 classical hard constructions (102 family entries corresponding to 99 distinct graphs). ΔΔ-DRESS produces unique fingerprints in 33 of 34 benchmark families at k=1k=1, resolving all but one within-family collision among over 576 million non-isomorphic pairs. One genuine collision exists at deletion depth k=1k=1, between two vertex-transitive SRGs in SRG(40,12,2,4), which is resolved by a single-step fallback to Δ2Δ^2-DRESS. For every family with pairwise-comparable full sorted-multiset fingerprints, the minimum observed separation margin remains at least 137×ε137 \times ε, confirming that the reported separations are numerically robust and not artifacts of the convergence threshold. We also show that ΔΔ-DRESS separates the Rook L2(4)L_2(4)/Shrikhande pair, proving it escapes the theoretical boundary of 3-WL. The method runs in O(n⋅I⋅m⋅dmax⁡)\mathcal{O}(n \cdot I \cdot m \cdot d_{\max}) time per graph.
Mar 9, 2026

Towards Effective and Efficient Graph Alignment without Supervision

Unsupervised graph alignment aims to find the node correspondence across different graphs without any anchor node pairs. Despite the recent efforts utilizing deep learning-based techniques, such as the embedding and optimal transport (OT)-based approaches, we observe their limitations in terms of model accuracy-efficiency tradeoff. By focusing on the exploitation of local and global graph information, we formalize them as the local representation, global alignment'' paradigm, and present a new global representation and alignment'' paradigm to resolve the mismatch between the two phases in the alignment process. We then propose Global representation and optimal transport-based Alignment (GlobAlign), and its variant, GlobAlign-E, for better Efficiency. Our methods are equipped with the global attention mechanism and a hierarchical cross-graph transport cost, able to capture long-range and implicit node dependencies beyond the local graph structure. Furthermore, GlobAlign-E successfully closes the time complexity gap between representative embedding and OT-based methods, reducing OT's cubic complexity to quadratic terms. Through extensive experiments, our methods demonstrate superior performance, with up to a 20% accuracy improvement over the best competitor. Meanwhile, GlobAlign-E achieves the best efficiency, with an order of magnitude speedup against existing OT-based methods.
Feb 25, 2026

AutoSew: A Geometric Approach to Stitching Prediction with Graph Neural Networks

Automating garment assembly from sewing patterns remains a significant challenge due to the lack of standardized annotation protocols and the frequent absence of semantic cues. Existing methods often rely on panel labels or handcrafted heuristics, which limit their applicability to real-world, non-conforming patterns. We present AutoSew, a fully automatic, geometry-based approach for predicting stitch correspondences directly from 2D pattern contours. AutoSew formulates the problem as a graph matching task, leveraging a Graph Neural Network to capture local and global geometric context, and employing a differentiable optimal transport solver to infer stitching relationships-including multi-edge connections. To support this task, we update the GarmentCodeData dataset modifying over 18k patterns with realistic multi-edge annotations, reflecting industrial assembly scenarios. AutoSew achieves 96% F1-score and successfully assembles 73.3% of test garments without error, outperforming existing methods while relying solely on geometric input. Our results demonstrate that geometry alone can robustly guide stitching prediction, enabling scalable garment assembly without manual input.
May 19, 2025

Graph Alignment for Benchmarking Graph Neural Networks and Learning Positional Encodings

We propose a novel benchmarking methodology for graph neural networks (GNNs) based on the graph alignment problem, a combinatorial optimization task that generalizes graph isomorphism by aligning two unlabeled graphs to maximize overlapping edges. We frame this problem as a self-supervised learning task and present several methods to generate graph alignment datasets using synthetic random graphs and real-world graph datasets from multiple domains. For a given graph dataset, we generate a family of graph alignment datasets with increasing difficulty, allowing us to rank the performance of various architectures. Our experiments prove that there is an optimal task difficulty for having a statistically relevant ranking of different models and that, even on a structure-only task, anisotropic models perform better compared to isotropic ones. To further prove that our synthetic task capture meaningful information, we show its effectiveness for self-supervised GNN pre-training: the learned node embeddings can be leveraged as positional encodings by transformers for graph regression or can be used to reconstruct the full structure of the graph with 98%98\% accuracy. To support reproducibility and further research, we provide an open-source Python package to generate graph alignment datasets and benchmark new GNN architectures. The source code is available at https://github.com/adrien-lagesse/graph-alignment-benchmark.