Non-Elementary Complexities for Branching VASS, MELL, and Extensions

Abstract: We study the complexity of reachability problems on branching extensions of vector addition systems, which allows us to derive new non-elementary complexity bounds for fragments and variants of propositional linear logic. We show that provability in the multiplicative exponential fragment is Tower-hard already in the affine case -- and hence non-elementary. We match this lower bound for the full propositional affine linear logic, proving its Tower-completeness. We also show that provability in propositional contractive linear logic is Ackermann-complete.