Hardness of Regular Expression Matching with Extensions

arXiv:2601.03020v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The regular expression matching problem asks whether a given regular expression of length $m$ matches a given string of length $n$. As is well known, the problem can be solved in $O(nm)$ time using Thompson's algorithm. Moreover, recent studies have shown that regular expression matching extended with a practical extension called lookaround can be solved in the same time complexity. In this work, we consider four well-known extensions to regular expressions called backreference, squaring, intersection and complement. We prove a number of novel time complexity lower bounds for regular expression matching with these extensions under the Orthogonal Vectors Conjecture (OVC), $k$-OVC, $k$-Clique Hypothesis, and Combinatorial $k$-Clique H