Graph Matching
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.
Breaking Hard Isomorphism Benchmarks with DRESS
Towards Effective and Efficient Graph Alignment without Supervision
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.