“…To date, a multitude of pairwise network alignment methods have been developed based on the consistency principle (Singh, Xu, and Berger 2008;Koutra, Tong, and Lubensky 2013;Zhang and Tong 2016), node embedding (Li et al 2019;Chu et al 2019;Zhang et al 2021), and optimal transport (OT) (Maretic et al 2019(Maretic et al , 2022Chen et al 2020;Zeng et al 2023a) with superior performance, but this is not the case for the multi-network setting due to two fundamental challenges. First (discrepancy measure), most existing pairwise methods essentially optimize the pairwise discrepancy (e.g., Frobenius norm (Zhang and Tong 2016), contrastive loss (Chu et al 2019), and Wasserstein distance (Maretic et al 2020)) between one network and its aligned counterpart, but a similar discrepancy measure for multi-network is lacking.…”