On generalized corners and matrix multiplication

Abstract: Suppose that $S \subseteq [n]^2$ contains no three points of the form $(x,y), (x,y+\delta), (x+\delta,y')$, where $\delta \neq 0$. How big can $S$ be? Trivially, $n \le |S| \le n^2$. Slight improvements on these bounds are obtained from Shkredov's upper bound for the corners problem [Shk06], which shows that $|S| \le O(n^2/(\log \log n)^c)$ for some small $c > 0$, and a construction due to Petrov [Pet23], which shows that $|S| \ge \Omega(n \log n/\sqrt{\log \log n})$. Could it be that for all $\varepsilon > 0$, $|S| \le O(n^{1+\varepsilon})$? We show that if so, this would rule out obtaining $\omega = 2$ using a large family of abelian groups in the group-theoretic framework of Cohn, Kleinberg, Szegedy and Umans CU03,CKSU05, for which no barriers are currently known. Furthermore, an upper bound of $O(n^{4/3 - \varepsilon})$ for any fixed $\varepsilon > 0$ would rule out a conjectured approach to obtain $\omega = 2$ of [CKSU05]. Along the way, we encounter several problems that have much stronger constraints and that would already have these implications.