Neural Graduated Assignment for Maximum Common Edge Subgraphs

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Ying, Chaolong, Ruan, Yingqi, Chen, Xuemin, Wang, Yaomin, Yu, Tianshu
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Ying, Chaolong
Ruan, Yingqi
Chen, Xuemin
Wang, Yaomin
Yu, Tianshu
author_facet Ying, Chaolong
Ruan, Yingqi
Chen, Xuemin
Wang, Yaomin
Yu, Tianshu
contents The Maximum Common Edge Subgraph (MCES) problem is a crucial challenge with significant implications in domains such as biology and chemistry. Traditional approaches, which include transformations into max-clique and search-based algorithms, suffer from scalability issues when dealing with larger instances. This paper introduces ``Neural Graduated Assignment'' (NGA), a simple, scalable, unsupervised-training-based method that addresses these limitations. Central to NGA is stacking of differentiable assignment optimization with neural components, enabling high-dimensional parameterization of the matching process through a learnable temperature mechanism. We further theoretically analyze the learning dynamics of NGA, showing its design leads to fast convergence, better exploration-exploitation tradeoff, and ability to escape local optima. Extensive experiments across MCES computation, graph similarity estimation, and graph retrieval tasks reveal that NGA not only significantly improves computation time and scalability on large instances but also enhances performance compared to existing methodologies. The introduction of NGA marks a significant advancement in the computation of MCES and offers insights into other assignment problems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_12325
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Neural Graduated Assignment for Maximum Common Edge Subgraphs
Ying, Chaolong
Ruan, Yingqi
Chen, Xuemin
Wang, Yaomin
Yu, Tianshu
Machine Learning
The Maximum Common Edge Subgraph (MCES) problem is a crucial challenge with significant implications in domains such as biology and chemistry. Traditional approaches, which include transformations into max-clique and search-based algorithms, suffer from scalability issues when dealing with larger instances. This paper introduces ``Neural Graduated Assignment'' (NGA), a simple, scalable, unsupervised-training-based method that addresses these limitations. Central to NGA is stacking of differentiable assignment optimization with neural components, enabling high-dimensional parameterization of the matching process through a learnable temperature mechanism. We further theoretically analyze the learning dynamics of NGA, showing its design leads to fast convergence, better exploration-exploitation tradeoff, and ability to escape local optima. Extensive experiments across MCES computation, graph similarity estimation, and graph retrieval tasks reveal that NGA not only significantly improves computation time and scalability on large instances but also enhances performance compared to existing methodologies. The introduction of NGA marks a significant advancement in the computation of MCES and offers insights into other assignment problems.
title Neural Graduated Assignment for Maximum Common Edge Subgraphs
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12325