Deep functional map frameworks (DFM) for shape correspondence are powerful, yet fundamentally limited by their reliance on end-to-end differentiability. This constraint prevents the integration of highly accurate, non-differentiable refinement techniques, capping their overall performance, especially on challenging non-isometric shapes. To overcome this, we introduce MDND, a novel DFM paradigm built on the principle of merging differentiable and non-differentiable components. Our framework facilitates unsupervised learning guided by an internal, non-differentiable refinement. Specifically, MDND employs a dual-branch architecture: a non-differentiable refinement branch leverages a novel, multiscale iterative solver to produce highly robust correspondences, acting as a refined target. Concurrently, a fully differentiable branch learns to predict correspondences from features. The entire system is trained end-to-end without supervision by enforcing a consistency loss that compels the differentiable branch to learn from the superior, refined results of the non-differentiable branch. Extensive experiments show that MDND sets a new state-of-the-art, demonstrating remarkable robustness on shapes with non-isometric deformations and topological noise.

Abstract In deep functional maps, the regularizer computing the functional map is especially crucial for ensuring the global consistency of the computed pointwise map. As the regularizers integrated into deep learning should be differentiable, it is not trivial to incorporate informative axiomatic structural constraints into the deep functional map, such as the orientation‐preserving term. Although commonly used regularizers include the Laplacian‐commutativity term and the resolvent Laplacian commutativity term, these are limited to single‐scale analysis for capturing geometric information. To this end, we propose a novel and theoretically well‐justified regularizer commuting the functional map with the multiscale spectral manifold wavelet operator. This regularizer enhances the isometric constraints of the functional map and is conducive to providing it with better structural properties with multiscale analysis. Furthermore, we design an unsupervised deep functional map with the regularizer in a fully differentiable way. The quantitative and qualitative comparisons with several existing techniques on the (near‐)isometric and non‐isometric datasets show our method's superior accuracy and generalization capabilities. Additionally, we illustrate that our regularizer can be easily inserted into other functional map methods and improve their accuracy.