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1. Near-linear time decoding of Ta-Shma’s codes via splittable regularity

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3406325.3451126  

   Jeronimo, Fernando Granha; Srivastava, Shashank; Tulsiani, Madhur (June 2021, Proceedings of the 53rd Annual ACM SIGACT Symposium on Theory of Computing)

   null (Ed.)

   The Gilbert–Varshamov bound non-constructively establishes the existence of binary codes of distance 1/2−є/2 and rate Ω(є2). In a breakthrough result, Ta-Shma [STOC 2017] constructed the first explicit family of nearly optimal binary codes with distance 1/2−є/2 and rate Ω(є2+α), where α → 0 as є → 0. Moreover, the codes in Ta-Shma’s construction are є-balanced, where the distance between distinct codewords is not only bounded from below by 1/2−є/2, but also from above by 1/2+є/2. Polynomial time decoding algorithms for (a slight modification of) Ta-Shma’s codes appeared in [FOCS 2020], and were based on the Sum-of-Squares (SoS) semidefinite programming hierarchy. The running times for these algorithms were of the form NOα(1) for unique decoding, and NOє,α(1) for the setting of “gentle list decoding”, with large exponents of N even when α is a fixed constant. We derive new algorithms for both these tasks, running in time Õє(N). Our algorithms also apply to the general setting of decoding direct-sum codes. Our algorithms follow from new structural and algorithmic results for collections of k-tuples (ordered hypergraphs) possessing a “structured expansion” property, which we call splittability. This property was previously identified and used in the analysis of SoS-based decoding and constraint satisfaction algorithms, and is also known to be satisfied by Ta-Shma’s code construction. We obtain a new weak regularity decomposition for (possibly sparse) splittable collections W ⊆ [n]k, similar to the regularity decomposition for dense structures by Frieze and Kannan [FOCS 1996]. These decompositions are also computable in near-linear time Õ(|W |), and form a key component of our algorithmic results. 

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2. A Lower Bound for Sampling Disjoint Sets

   https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.APPROX-RANDOM.2019.51  

   Göös, Mika; Watson, Thomas (January 2019, Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Randomization and Computation (RANDOM))

   Suppose Alice and Bob each start with private randomness and no other input, and they wish to engage in a protocol in which Alice ends up with a set x ⊆ [n] and Bob ends up with a set y ⊆ [n], such that (x, y) is uniformly distributed over all pairs of disjoint sets. We prove that for some constant β < 1, this requires Ω(n) communication even to get within statistical distance 1 − β^n of the target distribution. Previously, Ambainis, Schulman, Ta-Shma, Vazirani, and Wigderson (FOCS 1998) proved that Ω(√n) communication is required to get within some constant statistical distance ε > 0 of the uniform distribution over all pairs of disjoint sets of size √n. 

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3. Near-linear time insertion-deletion codes and (1+ ε)-approximating edit distance via indexing

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3313276.3316371  

   Haeupler, Bernhard; Rubinstein, Aviad; Shahrasbi, Amirbehshad (April 2019, ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing)

   We introduce fast-decodable indexing schemes for edit distance which can be used to speed up edit distance computations to near-linear time if one of the strings is indexed by an indexing string I. In particular, for every length n and every ε >0, one can in near linear time construct a string I ∈ Σ′n with |Σ′| = Oε(1), such that, indexing any string S ∈ Σn, symbol-by-symbol, with I results in a string S′ ∈ Σ″n where Σ″ = Σ × Σ′ for which edit distance computations are easy, i.e., one can compute a (1+ε)-approximation of the edit distance between S′ and any other string in O(n (log n)) time. Our indexing schemes can be used to improve the decoding complexity of state-of-the-art error correcting codes for insertions and deletions. In particular, they lead to near-linear time decoding algorithms for the insertion-deletion codes of [Haeupler, Shahrasbi; STOC ‘17] and faster decoding algorithms for list-decodable insertion-deletion codes of [Haeupler, Shahrasbi, Sudan; ICALP ‘18]. Interestingly, the latter codes are a crucial ingredient in the construction of fast-decodable indexing schemes. 

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4. List-decodability with large radius for Reed-Solomon codes

   https://doi.org/10.1109/FOCS52979.2021.00075  

   Ferber, Asaf; Kwan, Matthew; Sauermann, Lisa (February 2022, 2021 IEEE 62nd Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS))

   List-decodability of Reed-Solomon codes has received a lot of attention, but the best-possible dependence between the parameters is still not well-understood. In this work, we focus on the case where the list-decoding radius is of the form r=1−ε for ε tending to zero. Our main result states that there exist Reed-Solomon codes with rate Ω(ε) which are (1−ε,O(1/ε)) -list-decodable, meaning that any Hamming ball of radius 1−ε contains at most O(1/ε) codewords. This trade-off between rate and list-decoding radius is best-possible for any code with list size less than exponential in the block length. By achieving this trade-off between rate and list-decoding radius we improve a recent result of Guo, Li, Shangguan, Tamo, and Wootters, and resolve the main motivating question of their work. Moreover, while their result requires the field to be exponentially large in the block length, we only need the field size to be polynomially large (and in fact, almost-linear suffices). We deduce our main result from a more general theorem, in which we prove good list-decodability properties of random puncturings of any given code with very large distance. 

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5. A Lower Bound for Sampling Disjoint Sets

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3404858  

   Göös, Mika; Watson, Thomas (July 2020, ACM Transactions on Computation Theory)

   Suppose Alice and Bob each start with private randomness and no other input, and they wish to engage in a protocol in which Alice ends up with a set x ⊆ [ n ] and Bob ends up with a set y ⊆ [ n ], such that ( x , y ) is uniformly distributed over all pairs of disjoint sets. We prove that for some constant β < 1, this requires Ω ( n ) communication even to get within statistical distance 1− β n of the target distribution. Previously, Ambainis, Schulman, Ta-Shma, Vazirani, and Wigderson (FOCS 1998) proved that Ω (√ n ) communication is required to get within some constant statistical distance ɛ > 0 of the uniform distribution over all pairs of disjoint sets of size √ n . 

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