The HOM Problem is EXPTIME-Complete

Abstract

The HOM problem questions whether the image of a given regular tree language through a given tree homomorphism is also regular. Decidability of HOM is an important theoretical question which was open for a long time. Recently, HOM has been proved decidable with a triple exponential time algorithm. In this paper we obtain an exponential time algorithm for this problem, and conclude that it is EXPTIME-complete. The proof builds upon previous results and techniques on tree automata with constraints.