Paper: M3C: A Framework towards Convergent, Flexible, and Unsupervised Learning of Mixture Graph Matching and Clustering (ICLR-2024)

Reviewer comment (Experiments):
The pairwise graph matching relies on the Lawler's QAP formulation which is known to not scale well with the size of the graphs. In the experiment all the graphs are short (less than 20 nodes for most), this is not the case in general.

Author response:
- **W1:** the pairwise graph matching relies on the Lawler's QAP formulation which is known to not scale well with the size of the graphs. In the experiement all the graphs are shorts (less than 20 nodes for most), this is not the case in general.
  - PascalVOC serves as a challenging benchmark even in the two-graph matching setting with 10-20 key points. Notably, state-of-the-art two-graph matching methods achieve only ~83% matching accuracy (full matching) and ~71% F1 score (for partial matching) on this dataset. Though achieving state-of-the-art performance on MGMC, we believe that these datasets could still serve as the benchmark given the space for improvement. When an algorithm eventually solve the problem on this dataset (e.g. over 90 matching accuracy), this field can move into larger graphs with more key points and more complex structure.

Reviewer comment (Experiments):
The framework needs an initialization with a classical pairwise method. We may expect some sensitivity with the chosen method. There is no discussion on this part. Furthermore, there exist better methods than RRWM, such as KerGM (which is able to use edge attributes) and GWL.

Author response:
- **W2:** the comparison with the state of art is missing many others existing methods. The proposed methods are all from the very same team. I would expect a better state-of-art. For example on the deep learning side we have (to cite a few),
  - We have added all the mentioned papers into related work.
  - We also add experiments of two latest works: GCAN[1] and COMMON[2] on PascalVOC with 3*8 setting, where COMMON is the sota of 2GM setting on PascalVOC. Here, only a partial presentation of the results is provided. The complete set of comparison experiments has been incorporated into Section 6 (Experiments), and the corresponding discussion has been revised accordingly. For more details, we kindly request you to refer to the complete paper.
| Setting | Protocal     | Model      | MA     | CA     | CP     | RI     | time   |
| ------- | ------------ | ---------- | ------ | ------ | ------ | ------ | ------ |
| 3*8     | supervised   | NGMv2      | 0.8114 | 0.755  | 0.8083 | 0.8165 | 4.2586 |
| 3*8     | supervised   | BBGM       | 0.7919 | 0.7973 | 0.8406 | 0.8371 | 2.2618 |
| 3*8     | supervised   | UM3C+BBGM  | 0.8037 | 0.8945 | 0.9212 | 0.918  | 5.1646 |
| 3*8     | supervised   | GCAN       | 0.8049 | 0.8089 | 0.8537 | 0.8438 | -      |
| 3*8     | unsupervised | GCAN+M3C   | 0.75   | 0.824  | 0.8637 | 0.8565 | -      |
| 3*8     | supervised   | COMMON     | 0.8334 | 0.9318 | 0.9467 | 0.9458 | -      |
| 3*8     | unsupervised | COMMON+M3C | 0.8435 | 0.9494 | 0.9629 | 0.9595 | -      |

Reviewer comment (Experiments):
The comparison with the state of the art is missing many other existing methods. The proposed methods are all from the very same team. A better state-of-the-art comparison is expected. For example, on the deep learning side, methods such as SIGMA, "Universe Points Representation Learning for Partial Multi-Graph Matching", and DGMC could be considered.

Author response:
- **W3:** the full framework is focus on images. It is difficult to assess if it can be extended to general graphs. For example, in the DGMC paper there is an experiment where the attributes are only coordinates.
  - Actually, in the learning-free setting, only coordinates are used as input to calculate the hand-crafted affinity K, without involving the features of image points. Our learning-free method M3C demonstrates its competitiveness compared to other learning-free algorithms in that case.

Reviewer comment (Experiments):
The full framework is focused on images. It is difficult to assess if it can be extended to general graphs. For example, in the DGMC paper there is an experiment where the attributes are only coordinates.

Author response:
- **W3:** the full framework is focus on images. It is difficult to assess if it can be extended to general graphs. For example, in the DGMC paper there is an experiment where the attributes are only coordinates.
  - Actually, in the learning-free setting, only coordinates are used as input to calculate the hand-crafted affinity K, without involving the features of image points. Our learning-free method M3C demonstrates its competitiveness compared to other learning-free algorithms in that case.

Reviewer comment (Reproducibility):
In the cluster part, the MM method asks to solve two problems (namely equations (6) and (7)). Both problems remain hard to solve, so it is unclear how they can be solved in a proper way. Only one method is proposed but not really described.

Author response:
- **Q1:** the MM method asks to solve two problems (namely equations (6) and (7)). Both problems remain hard to solve so I don't see how they can be solved in a proper way. Only one method is proposed but not really described.
  - In ensuring a fair comparison with prior work, we employ spectral clustering for Eq 6 and utilize MGM-Floyd as the solver for Eq 7, given its state-of-the-art performance in addressing the multi-graph matching problem. Furthermore, in Appendix H.3, we conduct an experiment demonstrating minimal variance in results when transitioning from spectral clustering to the multi-cut algorithm. This observation underscores our argument that the crux of MGMC lies in the joint solving of the two problems, affirming its pivotal role in the overarching task.

Reviewer comment (Reproducibility):
The supergraph is an important tool here. It is unclear how it is really built and whether some heuristic is needed to lessen the problem.

Author response:
- **Q2:** the supergraph is an important tool here. How is it really built? Do we need some heuristic to lessen the problem?
  - The concept of a supergraph involves representing all input graphs as nodes, with connectivity and edge weight (often the affinity score) indicating the relationship between the graphs. In typical multi-graph matching algorithms, the supergraph manifests as a complete graph or clique, where each edge's weight corresponds to the affinity score between any two graphs. However, our proposed framework deviates from this norm by constructing a complete graph within clusters and maintaining no edges between them (M3C-Hard).
  - Proposition 4.1 elucidates that this non-optimal structure, derived from clustering, serves as a critical aspect of our M3C algorithm. To enhance the solution, we introduce three ranking schemes for constructing a supergraph, addressing the limitations of the initial complete graph construction. Thus, the dual contributions of our M3C algorithm lie in its general framework and the innovation of an improved supergraph construction method.

Reviewer comment (Reproducibility):
In the deep learning part, it is unclear how the features on edges are built. Specifically, how the VGG-16 features are used in this case is not explained.

Author response:
- **Q3:** how the features on edges are build? I don't see how the VGG-16 features are used in this case.
  -  The edge feature is computed as $\mathbf{E}_{i,j}=\mathbf{F}^n_i - \mathbf{F}^n_j$ in practice to align with prior work.

Reviewer comment (Experiments):
It is unclear how much the method is sensitive toward the initialization of the pseudo-labels. From the experiments, RRWM seems good enough (in the sense that they don't completely fail).

Author response:
- **Q4:** how much the method is sensitive toward the initialization of the pseudo-labels? From the experiments, RRWM seems good enough (in the sense they don't completely failed).
  - We performed a sensitivity experiment on pseudo-labels for UM3C. The experiments were carried out on the Willow Object dataset, where we selected Car, Duck, and Motorbike as the cluster classes. Outliers were not included, and RRWM was applied to generate pseudo-labels during training. The term "80% RRWM + UM3C" indicates that the pseudo-labels are constructed using 80% RRWM results and 20% random permutation results. The results are presented below. Importantly, it is observed that clustering metrics exhibit greater resilience than matching accuracy to the degradation of pseudo-labels. For further discussion, please refer to Appendix H7.
| Model            | $N_c$ | $N_g$ | MA | CA| CP | RI | time(s) |
|------------------|-------|-------|--------------|--------------|--------------|--------------|---------------------|
| 100\%RRWM + UM3C | 3     | 8     | 0.955        | 0.983        | 0.988        | 0.988        | 3.2                 |
| 80\%RRWM + UM3C  | 3     | 8     | 0.786        | 0.932        | 0.953        | 0.947        | 3.3                 |
| 60\%RRWM + UM3C  | 3     | 8     | 0.546        | 0.86         | 0.902        | 0.886        | 3.1                 |
| 40\%RRWM + UM3C  | 3     | 8     | 0.261        | 0.678        | 0.74         | 0.746        | 3.3                 |
| 20\%RRWM + UM3C  | 3     | 8     | 0.156        | 0.512        | 0.585        | 0.625        | 3.1                 |

Reviewer comment (Novelty):
The literature part lacks state-of-the-art works published in the last two years.

Author response:
- We have added GCAN[1], COMMON[2], Universe Points Representation Learning for Partial Multi-Graph Matching[3] to our related work.

Reviewer comment (Experiments):
The authors didn't compare with the latest works. The most recent competitor MGM-Floyd was published in 2021.

Author response:
- We add two latest works: **GCAN**[1] and **COMMON**[2] on PascalVOC with 3*8 setting, where **COMMON** is the sota of 2GM setting on PascalVOC. Here, only a partial presentation of the results is provided. The complete set of comparison experiments has been incorporated into Section 6 (Experiments), and the corresponding discussion has been revised accordingly. For more details, we kindly request you to refer to the complete paper.  
| Setting | Protocal     | Model      | MA     | CA     | CP     | RI     | time   |  
| ------- | ------------ | ---------- | ------ | ------ | ------ | ------ | ------ |  
| 3*8     | supervised   | NGMv2      | 0.8114 | 0.755  | 0.8083 | 0.8165 | 4.2586 |  
| 3*8     | supervised   | BBGM       | 0.7919 | 0.7973 | 0.8406 | 0.8371 | 2.2618 |  
| 3*8     | supervised   | UM3C+BBGM  | 0.8037 | 0.8945 | 0.9212 | 0.918  | 5.1646 |  
| 3*8     | supervised   | GCAN       | 0.8049 | 0.8089 | 0.8537 | 0.8438 | -      |  
| 3*8     | unsupervised | GCAN+M3C   | 0.75   | 0.824  | 0.8637 | 0.8565 | -      |  
| 3*8     | supervised   | COMMON     | 0.8334 | 0.9318 | 0.9467 | 0.9458 | -      |  
| 3*8     | unsupervised | COMMON+M3C | 0.8435 | 0.9494 | 0.9629 | 0.9595 | -      |  

[1] Zheheng Jiang, Hossein Rahmani, Plamen Angelov, Sue Black, Bryan M. Williams. "Graph-Context Attention Networks for Size-Varied Deep Graph Matching." CVPR 2022  

[2] Yijie Lin, Mouxing Yang, Jun Yu, Peng Hu, Changqing Zhang, Xi Peng. "Graph Matching with Bi-level Noisy Correspondence." ICCV 2023  

[3] Nurlanov Z, Schmidt F R, Bernard F. Universe points representation learning for partial multi-graph matching[C]//Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. 2023, 37(2): 1984-1992.

Reviewer comment (Novelty):
What's the major benefit of MGMC? For matching with mixed graph types, we could employ graph-level classification or clustering (so that labeling is also avoided) methods to preprocess the dataset and apply conventional graph matching methods to individual classes. No ablation experiment is conducted to verify the effectiveness of MGMC anyway.

Author response:
- The principal advantage of MGMC lies in its capacity to mutually optimize matching and clustering, enhancing the outcomes of both tasks.  
  - Clustering benefits from graph matching as a similarity metric, as highlighted by Wang et al., 2020a, who note, "The key challenge of multi-graph clustering is finding a reasonable measurement for graph-wise similarity, after which the common spectral clustering technique can be applied to discover clusters. We tackle this problem by proposing a matching-based graph-wise similarity measure for clustering. "  
  - Conversely, clustering also contributes to improved matching results. The distinction between multi-graph matching and two-graph matching lies in cycle consistency, necessitating transitivity across multiple graphs. However, this consistency becomes irrelevant between graphs of different clusters. Therefore, clustering provides a strategic division for graphs, allowing focused attention on cycle consistency within clusters while leaving other graphs unaffected.  
  - As noted by the reviewer, the suggestion to use graph-level classification or clustering methods for dataset preprocessing aligns with a one-iteration M3C-hard approach. This involves clustering the graphs initially and subsequently applying the MGM algorithm to each cluster.

Reviewer comment (Reproducibility):
Is it possible to integrate the proposed method into a fully end-to-end GM pipeline (such as NGMv2)?

Author response:
- Yes. It is feasible to integrate the method into a fully end-to-end GM pipeline. In Table 2, we have showcased an end-to-end unsupervised learning version of our method, which demonstrates superior performance compared to the unsupervised learning method GANN. Furthermore, by enhancing the feature extractor through our proposed affinity learning and employing our M3C solver for refining two-graph matching, a supervised end-to-end learning pipeline for M3C can be established based on NGMv2.

Reviewer comment (Theory):
The theoretical analysis may need further justification.

Author response:
- **Q2:** Convergence statement above Eq.(3): Eq.(3) only guarantees your objective function is non-decreasing, but not necessarily guarantee convergence? I think another important reason for the convergence of f is that the solution space (X,C) is finite. In some scenarios, even the objective function remains unchanged, multiple optimal solutions may exists (i.e., $f(X_i,C_i)=f(X_j,C_j)$), and the solution may switch between $(X_i,C_i$ and $X_j,C_j$) instead of converging.  
  - Allow us to elaborate on the convergence theorem underpinning this statement. MGMC problem inherently resembles an assignment problem, and its objective function exhibits a natural upper bound. For example, the objective function is smaller than the sum of all the affinity matrices for all assignments:$f(X^t) < \sum_{ij} \sum_{abcd} K_{ij}(a,b,c,d) \forall X^t$ .  
  - According to the **Monotone Convergence Theorem**, if a monotone sequence of real numbers, such as $f(X^t)$, is bounded (possessing an upper bound for an increasing sequence or a lower bound for a decreasing sequence), then the sequence converges.  
  - Evidently, $f(X^t)$ is non-decreasing and bounded, satisfying the conditions for convergence. This convergence holds true even if we relax the solution space $(X, C)$ into a continuous space since the function remains bounded.

Reviewer comment (Theory):
Though the UM3C method is called to be unsupervised, it still requires the hand-crafted affinity matrix, which is another kind of supervision.

Author response:
- **Q6:** Eq. (8): you claimed your method as unsupervised, but you need the hand-crafted $K^{raw}$ as input, which actually is another kind of supervision.  
  - It's important to clarify that the hand-crafted $K^{raw}$ is **not** provided as external supervision. Instead, it is calculated solely based on the input data. As detailed in Appendix F.2, $K^{raw}$ is computed from key point coordinates, incorporating factors such as length and angle. Key point coordinates are fundamental inputs for any graph matching model/algorithm, akin to pixel intensity for image segmentation. Therefore, the inclusion of key point coordinates in the computation of $K^{raw}$ should not be misconstrued as an additional form of supervision. It remains intrinsic to the unsupervised nature of our method.

Reviewer comment (Writing):
Section 4.1: what’s the definition for $g(X|X^t)$? Is it the graph matching objective function given the clustering result h(X^t)?

Author response:
- **Q1:** What’s the definition for $g(X|X^t)$?Is it the graph matching objective function given the clustering result h(X^t)?  
  - Yes, $g(X|X^t) = F(X, h(X^t))$ is a surrogate function crafted within the standard MM framework. By optimizing this surrogate function, we effectively ascertain the optimal matching result $X$ while keeping the cluster division $h(X^t)$ fixed. The construction of the surrogate function $g(X|X^t)$ is aimed at avoiding mutual optimization between matching and clustering, thereby simplifying the overall optimization task.

Reviewer comment (Theory):
Convergence statement above Eq.(3): Eq.(3) only guarantees your objective function is non-decreasing, but not necessarily guarantee convergence? I think another important reason for the convergence of f is that the solution space (X,C) is finite. In some scenarios, even the objective function remains unchanged, multiple optimal solutions may exist (i.e., $f(X_i,C_i)=f(X_j,C_j)$), and the solution may switch between $(X_i,C_i)$ and $(X_j,C_j)$ instead of converging.

Author response:
- **Q2:** Convergence statement above Eq.(3): Eq.(3) only guarantees your objective function is non-decreasing, but not necessarily guarantee convergence? I think another important reason for the convergence of f is that the solution space (X,C) is finite. In some scenarios, even the objective function remains unchanged, multiple optimal solutions may exists (i.e., $f(X_i,C_i)=f(X_j,C_j)$), and the solution may switch between $(X_i,C_i$ and $X_j,C_j$) instead of converging.  
  - Allow us to elaborate on the convergence theorem underpinning this statement. MGMC problem inherently resembles an assignment problem, and its objective function exhibits a natural upper bound. For example, the objective function is smaller than the sum of all the affinity matrices for all assignments:$f(X^t) < \sum_{ij} \sum_{abcd} K_{ij}(a,b,c,d) \forall X^t$ .  
  - According to the **Monotone Convergence Theorem**, if a monotone sequence of real numbers, such as $f(X^t)$, is bounded (possessing an upper bound for an increasing sequence or a lower bound for a decreasing sequence), then the sequence converges.  
  - Evidently, $f(X^t)$ is non-decreasing and bounded, satisfying the conditions for convergence. This convergence holds true even if we relax the solution space $(X, C)$ into a continuous space since the function remains bounded.

Reviewer comment (Theory):
Proposition 4.1: $N_{g_i}$ are used w/o definition. How can you guarantee the if condition that the sizes of clusters are the same in two consecutive iterations? I think this is a quite strict condition, and hence I don’t think this proposition provides insightful understanding to the convergence. Besides, you claimed a ‘quick convergence’ in Appendix C.3, it’s necessary to provide a convergence rate.

Author response:
- **Q3:** Proposition 4.1: $N_{g_i}$ are used w/o definition. How can you guarantee the if condition that the sizes of clusters are the same in two consecutive iterations? I think this is a quite strict condition, and hence I don’t think this proposition provide insightful understanding to the convergence. Besides, you claimed a ‘quick convergence’ in Appendix C.3, it’s necessary to provide a convergence rate.  
  - $N_{g_i}$ refers to the graph number of the i-th cluster, as defined in Appendix A. Due to the page limitation, we listed all definitions in Appendix A Table 3.  
  - The proposition 4.1 is presented as an extreme case demonstrating the possibility of quick convergence within a single optimization step. However, it is often the case in real world experiment. **Throughout the convergence experiments in Appendix H.4 , the cluster size in M3C-Hard remained unchanged in most cases**, aligning with the condition that sizes of clusters are the same.  
  - The quick convergence attributed to hard clustering arises from the optimization of the surrogate function $g(X|X^t)$, where the optimization process encourages graphs within the same cluster to move closer to each other.  
  - To elaborate, in the optimization of $g(X|X^t)$, the formulation involves maximizing the similarity within clusters, as indicated by the term 
$$\frac{1}{\sum_{ij} c_{ij}} \sum_{ij} c_{ij} \text{vec}(X_{ij})^{T} K_{ij} \text{vec}(X_{ij}),$$ 
with $C=h(X^{t}$) fixed. The binary nature of $c_{ij}$ (0 or 1) implies that only pairs within the same cluster undergo optimization. Consequently, graphs within the same cluster are encouraged to converge. This characteristic of hard clustering expedites convergence but limits the ability to correct clustering results during the optimization process.  
  - Furthermore, in Appendix H.4 Table 10, we present convergence experiments showcasing changes in the supergraph structure of M3C-hard, M3C, and DPMC per iteration. When the supergraph structure stabilizes, the optimization is fixed and the results converge. As illustrated in Table 10 (also shown below), M3C-Hard achieves swift convergence in merely three steps.  
| Iteration | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |  
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |  
| M3C-Hard | 10.48 | 0.56 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |  
| M3C | 20.44 | 2.04 | 1.56 | 0.24 | 0.04 | 0.08 | 0 | 0 | 0 |  
| DPMC | 10.16 | 6.16 | 3.28 | 1.20 | 0.48 | 0.32 | 0.24 | 0.24 | 0.24 |

Reviewer comment (Theory):
Section 4.2: you claimed disregarding the transitive relations as an advantage, can you explain why? As mentioned later you adopt a greedy search to get the top-$ rN^2$ values, this may break the transitive constraint, making it possible to have $c_{ik}=1, c_{kj}=1$ but $c_{ij}\neq 1$, which does not make sense to me.

Author response:
- **Q4:** Section 4.2: you claimed disregarding the transitive relations as an advantage, can you explain why? As mentioned later you adopt a greedy search to get the top-$ rN^2$ values, this may breaks the transitive constraint, making it possible to have $c_{ik}=1,c_{kj}=1$ but $c_{ij}\neq 1$, which does not make sense to me.  
  - The hard clustering division supergraph and fully connected supergraph represent two extrem cases for solving MGMC problem. The former eliminates the influence of graph pairs from other clusters, even if the cluster division is not precisely correct. On the other hand, the fully connected supergraph encompasses an excessively large solution space, laden with invalid information. Our relaxation strategy functions as a compromise between these two extremes. It expands the optimization space compared to hard clustering division, considering graphs that may have been wrongly assigned during the matching step. However, compared to the fully connected supergraph, it introduces restrictions to mitigate the influence of graph pairs from different clusters.  
  - Now going back to your question about breaking the transitive constraint, the strict enforcement of the transitive constraint implies that clusters must be independent in the supergraph, and the supergraph inside each cluster must form a clique. Given that the clustering result could be erroneous, this constraint could potentially hinder the utilization of useful information from other clusters, even if it was incorrectly assigned. Relaxing this constraint becomes a necessary step to achieve better performance within our framework. The relaxation enables the model to consider possibly valuable information from other clusters, improving the adaptability of the algorithm while pertaining to the nature of clustering.

Reviewer comment (Theory):
Eq. (8): you claimed your method as unsupervised, but you need the hand-crafted $K^{raw}$ as input, which actually is another kind of supervision.

Author response:
- **Q6:** Eq. (8): you claimed your method as unsupervised, but you need the hand-crafted $K^{raw}$ as input, which actually is another kind of supervision.  
  - It's important to clarify that the hand-crafted $K^{raw}$ is **not** provided as external supervision. Instead, it is calculated solely based on the input data. As detailed in Appendix F.2, $K^{raw}$ is computed from key point coordinates, incorporating factors such as length and angle. Key point coordinates are fundamental inputs for any graph matching model/algorithm, akin to pixel intensity for image segmentation. Therefore, the inclusion of key point coordinates in the computation of $K^{raw}$ should not be misconstrued as an additional form of supervision. It remains intrinsic to the unsupervised nature of our method.

Reviewer comment (Experiments):
The topic of joint matching and clustering for graphs is sound, although the authors should strive to find situations that are more elaborated than their examples on images. This assumes that images are best coded as graphs, yet nothing is said in support of that. Also, the graphs representing images are quite simple. The authors should think about situations where the affinity graphs are less simple, and the graphs more complex.

Author response:
- **Q1:** The topic of joint matching and clustering for graphs is sound, although the authors should strive to find situations that are more elaborated than their examples on images. This assumes that images are best coded as graphs, yet nothing is said in support of that; also; the graphs representing images are quite simple. The authors should think about situations where the affinity graphs are less simple, and the graphs more complex.
  - We appreciate your recognition of the validity of our joint matching and clustering problem.  We have introduced the concept in the context of traffic tracking, where surveillance camera footage captures diverse entities such as people, bicycles, and cars concurrently. Each of these entities can be delineated by several feature points of interest, forming a complex graph structure. In this scenario, the MGMC paradigm proves invaluable for efficiently tracking different modes of data. Noteworthy applications of graph matching methods in tracking tasks, exemplified by works such as He et al.'s "Learnable Graph Matching: Incorporating Graph Partitioning with Deep Feature Learning for Multiple Object Tracking" (CVPR 2021) and Wu et al.'s "Multiview Vehicle Tracking by Graph Matching Model" (CVPR AI City Challenge 2019), further underscore the versatility of our approach.
  - However, it is crucial to emphasize that in this paper, we position MGMC more as an **upstream problem**, focusing on the general setting and adherence to standard evaluation benchmarks. We acknowledge that we are still at a nascent stage of the MGMC problem, with only two existing works, DPMC and GANN, addressing it (another relavant work Krahn et al. "Convex Joint Graph Matching and Clustering via Semidefinite Relaxations" adopts a different setting). **Our evaluation aligns with the standard presented in these two papers, advancing them by utilizing a more complex dataset, PascalVOC.** PascalVOC serves as a challenging benchmark even in the two-graph matching setting with 10-20 key points. Notably, state-of-the-art two-graph matching methods achieve only ~83% matching accuracy (full matching) and ~71% F1 score (for partial matching) on this dataset. Though achieving state-of-the-art performance on MGMC, we believe that these datasets could still serve as the benchmark given the space for improvement. When an algorithm eventually solve the problem on this dataset (e.g. over 90 matching accuracy), this field can move into larger graphs with more key points and more complex structure.

Reviewer comment (Writing):
Page 1: K (the affinity matrix) is not defined.

Author response:
- **Q2:** page 1 : K (the affinity matrix) is not defined
  - $K_{ij} \in R^{n_i\times n_j, n_i\times n_j}$ is the affinity matrix whose diagonal elements and off-diagonal ones encode the node-to-node and edge-to-edge affinity between two graphs $G_i$ and $G_j$, respectively. We give all the definition in Appendix A due to the limitation of pages.

Reviewer comment (Writing):
Page 6 in section 5.1: Where is \Lambda defined?

Author response:
- **Q3:** p 6 in 5.1: Where is \Lambda defined ?
  - $\Lambda \in R^{d\times d}$ where d is the dimension of the learned feature. $\Lambda$ is a learnable parameter to weight features that is a common practice in matching tasks since the paper "Deep Learning of Graph Matching", A Zanfir et. al, CVPR 2018.

Reviewer comment (Experiments):
Is there a comparison to simpler graph matching methods, for instance using optimal transport distance, that are known to also be usable for clustering?

Author response:
- **Q4:** Is there a comparison to simpler graph matching methods, for instance using optimal transport distance, that are known to also be usable for clustering ?
  - A prior study by Wang et al. ("Learning Combinatorial Embedding Networks for Deep Graph Matching," ICCV 2019) introduced the PCA method. Operating within a simplified context, PCA ignores edge constraints during matching and employs **Sinkhorn as a differentiable solver, aligning with the concept of optimal transport**. We present PCA's performance in tackling the MGMC problem on the PascalVOC dataset. Our analysis shows that PCA lags behind methods rooted in more complex settings where the edge information is consicdered, such as BBGM and NGMv2. Additionally, PCA demonstrates significantly lower accuracy compared to our UM3C(+BBGM). We believe this assessment adequately addresses the performance of optimal transport-related methods on this particular topic.
  | Setting | Protocal   | Model     | MA     | CA     | CP     | RI     | time   |
  | ------- | ---------- | --------- | ------ | ------ | ------ | ------ | ------ |
  | 3*8     | supervised | PCA       | 0.7228 | 0.7152 | 0.769  | 0.7865 | -      |
  | 3*8     | supervised | NGMv2     | 0.8114 | 0.755  | 0.8083 | 0.8165 | 4.2586 |
  | 3*8     | supervised | BBGM      | 0.7919 | 0.7973 | 0.8406 | 0.8371 | 2.2618 |
  | 3*8     | supervised | UM3C+BBGM | 0.8037 | 0.8945 | 0.9212 | 0.918  | 5.1646 |

Reviewer comment (Theory):
In section 4.2, and then in section 4.3, a softened version of the hard assignment matrix, C, is introduced. Is it only a relaxation for easier convergence, or does the relaxed matrices capture something about possible confusion between the clusters? It would be useful if it is the case, as we often have clusters which are not as clear cut as hard assignment is assuming.

Author response:
- **Q5:** In 4.2, and then in 4.3, a softened version of the hard assignment matrix, C, is introduced. Is it only anrelaxation for easier convergence, or does the relaxed matrices capture something about possible confusion between the clusters ? It would be useful if it is the case, as we often have clusters which are not as clear cut as hard assignment is assuming.
  - The incorporation of the softened version of constraint matrix C serves the purpose of guiding the algorithm towards an **improved solution** (as opposed to merely easier convergence) in comparison to the baseline method M3C-Hard. In fact, M3C-Hard converges faster (but to a worse result) as we presented in Appendix H.4 Table. 10. 
  - The efficacy of achieving a better solution can be attributed to the method employed in constructing matrix C, which utilizes three proposed ranking schemes. This comprehensive approach enables the identification and capture of potential confusion between clusters, thereby enhancing the algorithm's capacity to converge towards better solutions.