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1. General Strong Polarization

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3491390  

   Błasiok, Jarosław; Guruswami, Venkatesan; Nakkiran, Preetum; Rudra, Atri; Sudan, Madhu (April 2022, Journal of the ACM)

   Arıkan’s exciting discovery of polar codes has provided an altogether new way to efficiently achieve Shannon capacity. Given a (constant-sized) invertible matrix M , a family of polar codes can be associated with this matrix and its ability to approach capacity follows from the polarization of an associated [0, 1]-bounded martingale, namely its convergence in the limit to either 0 or 1 with probability 1. Arıkan showed appropriate polarization of the martingale associated with the matrix ( G 2 = ( 1 1 0 1) to get capacity achieving codes. His analysis was later extended to all matrices M that satisfy an obvious necessary condition for polarization. While Arıkan’s theorem does not guarantee that the codes achieve capacity at small blocklengths (specifically in length, which is a polynomial in ( 1ε ) where (ε) is the difference between the capacity of a channel and the rate of the code), it turns out that a “strong” analysis of the polarization of the underlying martingale would lead to such constructions. Indeed for the martingale associated with ( G 2 ) such a strong polarization was shown in two independent works (Guruswami and Xia (IEEE IT’15) and Hassani et al. (IEEE IT’14)), thereby resolving a major theoretical challenge associated with the efficient attainment of Shannon capacity. In this work we extend the result above to cover martingales associated with all matrices that satisfy the necessary condition for (weak) polarization. In addition to being vastly more general, our proofs of strong polarization are (in our view) also much simpler and modular. Key to our proof is a notion of local polarization that only depends on the evolution of the martingale in a single time step. We show that local polarization always implies strong polarization. We then apply relatively simple reasoning about conditional entropies to prove local polarization in very general settings. Specifically, our result shows strong polarization over all prime fields and leads to efficient capacity-achieving source codes for compressing arbitrary i.i.d. sources, and capacity-achieving channel codes for arbitrary symmetric memoryless channels. We show how to use our analyses to achieve exponentially small error probabilities at lengths inverse polynomial in the gap to capacity. Indeed we show that we can essentially match any error probability while maintaining lengths that are only inverse polynomial in the gap to capacity. 

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2. Polar Codes with Exponentially Small Error at Finite Block Length

   https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.APPROX-RANDOM.2018.34  

   Blasiok, Jaroslaw; Guruswami, Venkatesan; Sudan, Mahdu (January 2018, Leibniz international proceedings in informatics)

   We show that the entire class of polar codes (up to a natural necessary condition) converge to capacity at block lengths polynomial in the gap to capacity, while simultaneously achieving failure probabilities that are exponentially small in the block length (i.e., decoding fails with probability exp(-N^{Omega(1)}) for codes of length N). Previously this combination was known only for one specific family within the class of polar codes, whereas we establish this whenever the polar code exhibits a condition necessary for any polarization. Our results adapt and strengthen a local analysis of polar codes due to the authors with Nakkiran and Rudra [Proc. STOC 2018]. Their analysis related the time-local behavior of a martingale to its global convergence, and this allowed them to prove that the broad class of polar codes converge to capacity at polynomial block lengths. Their analysis easily adapts to show exponentially small failure probabilities, provided the associated martingale, the "Arikan martingale", exhibits a corresponding strong local effect. The main contribution of this work is a much stronger local analysis of the Arikan martingale. This leads to the general result claimed above. In addition to our general result, we also show, for the first time, polar codes that achieve failure probability exp(-N^{beta}) for any beta < 1 while converging to capacity at block length polynomial in the gap to capacity. Finally we also show that the "local" approach can be combined with any analysis of failure probability of an arbitrary polar code to get essentially the same failure probability while achieving block length polynomial in the gap to capacity. 

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3. Capacity-Achieving Polar-Based Codes With Sparsity Constraints on the Generator Matrices

   https://doi.org/10.1109/TCOMM.2023.3282603  

   Pang, James Chin-Jen; Mahdavifar, Hessam; Pradhan, S. Sandeep (September 2023, IEEE Transactions on Communications)

   In general, the generator matrix sparsity is a critical factor in determining the encoding complexity of a linear code. Further, certain applications, e.g., distributed crowdsourcing schemes utilizing linear codes, require most or even all the columns of the generator matrix to have some degree of sparsity. In this paper, we leverage polar codes and the well-established channel polarization to design capacity-achieving codes with a certain constraint on the weights of all the columns in the generator matrix (GM) while having a low-complexity decoding algorithm. We first show that given a binary-input memoryless symmetric (BMS) channel $$W$$ and a constant $$s \in (0, 1]$$ , there exists a polarization kernel such that the corresponding polar code is capacity-achieving with the rate of polarization $s/2$ , and the GM column weights being bounded from above by $$N^{s}$$ . To improve the sparsity versus error rate trade-off, we devise a column-splitting algorithm and two coding schemes for BEC and then for general BMS channels. The polar-based codes generated by the two schemes inherit several fundamental properties of polar codes with the original $$2 \times 2$$ kernel including the decay in error probability, decoding complexity, and the capacity-achieving property. Furthermore, they demonstrate the additional property that their GM column weights are bounded from above sublinearly in $$N$$ , while the original polar codes have some column weights that are linear in $$N$$ . In particular, for any BEC and $$\beta < 0.5$$ , the existence of a sequence of capacity-achieving polar-based codes where all the GM column weights are bounded from above by $$N^{\lambda} $$ with $$\lambda \approx 0.585$$ , and with the error probability bounded by $${\mathcal {O}}(2^{-N^{\beta }})$$ under a decoder with complexity $${\mathcal {O}}(N\log N)$$ , is shown. The existence of similar capacity-achieving polar-based codes with the same decoding complexity is shown for any BMS channel and $$\beta < 0.5$$ with $$\lambda \approx 0.631$$ . 

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4. Capacity-achieving Polar-based LDGM Codes with Crowdsourcing Applications

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ISIT44484.2020.9174358  

   Pang, James (June 2020, Proceedings of IEEE International symposium on information theory)

   In this paper we study codes with sparse generator matrices. More specifically, codes with a certain constraint on the weight of all the columns in the generator matrix are considered. The end result is the following. For any binary-input memoryless symmetric (BMS) channel and any e>0.085, we show an explicit sequence of capacity-achieving codes with all the column wights of the generator matrix upper bounded by (log N) to the power (1+e), where N is the code block length. The constructions are based on polar codes. Applications to crowdsourcing are also shown. 

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5. Accelerating Polarization via Alphabet Extension

   Duursma, Iwan; Gabrys, Ryan; Guruswami, Venkatesan; Lin, Ting-Chun; Wang, Hsin-Po (September 2022, Leibniz international proceedings in informatics)

   Polarization is an unprecedented coding technique in that it not only achieves channel capacity, but also does so at a faster speed of convergence than any other technique. This speed is measured by the "scaling exponent" and its importance is three-fold. Firstly, estimating the scaling exponent is challenging and demands a deeper understanding of the dynamics of communication channels. Secondly, scaling exponents serve as a benchmark for different variants of polar codes that helps us select the proper variant for real-life applications. Thirdly, the need to optimize for the scaling exponent sheds light on how to reinforce the design of polar code. In this paper, we generalize the binary erasure channel (BEC), the simplest communication channel and the protagonist of many polar code studies, to the "tetrahedral erasure channel" (TEC). We then invoke Mori-Tanaka’s 2 × 2 matrix over 𝔽_4 to construct polar codes over TEC. Our main contribution is showing that the dynamic of TECs converges to an almost-one-parameter family of channels, which then leads to an upper bound of 3.328 on the scaling exponent. This is the first non-binary matrix whose scaling exponent is upper-bounded. It also polarizes BEC faster than all known binary matrices up to 23 × 23 in size. Our result indicates that expanding the alphabet is a more effective and practical alternative to enlarging the matrix in order to achieve faster polarization. 

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