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1. Near-Optimal List-Recovery of Linear Code Families

   https://doi.org/10.4230/lipics.approx/random.2025.53  

   Li, Ray; Shagrithaya, Nikhil (September 2025, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik)

   Ene, Alina; Chattopadhyay, Eshan (Ed.)

   Abstract: We prove several results on linear codes achieving list-recovery capacity. We show that random linear codes achieve list-recovery capacity with constant output list size (independent of the alphabet size and length). That is, over alphabets of size at least 𝓁^Ω(1/ε), random linear codes of rate R are (1-R-ε, 𝓁, (𝓁/ε)^O(𝓁/ε))-list-recoverable for all R ∈ (0,1) and 𝓁. Together with a result of Levi, Mosheiff, and Shagrithaya, this implies that randomly punctured Reed-Solomon codes also achieve list-recovery capacity. We also prove that our output list size is near-optimal among all linear codes: all (1-R-ε, 𝓁, L)-list-recoverable linear codes must have L ≥ 𝓁^{Ω(R/ε)}. Our simple upper bound combines the Zyablov-Pinsker argument with recent bounds from Kopparty, Ron-Zewi, Saraf, Wootters, and Tamo on the maximum intersection of a "list-recovery ball" and a low-dimensional subspace with large distance. Our lower bound is inspired by a recent lower bound of Chen and Zhang. 

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2. Synchronization strings: codes for insertions and deletions approaching the singleton bound

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3055399.3055498  

   Haeupler, Bernhard; Shahrasbi, Amirbehshad (October 2017, ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing)

   We introduce synchronization strings, which provide a novel way of efficiently dealing with synchronization errors, i.e., insertions and deletions. Synchronization errors are strictly more general and much harder to deal with than more commonly considered half-errors, i.e., symbol corruptions and erasures. For every ε > 0, synchronization strings allow to index a sequence with an ε-O(1) size alphabet such that one can efficiently transform k synchronization errors into (1 + ε)k half-errors. This powerful new technique has many applications. In this paper we focus on designing insdel codes, i.e., error correcting block codes (ECCs) for insertion deletion channels. While ECCs for both half-errors and synchronization errors have been intensely studied, the later has largely resisted progress. As Mitzenmacher puts it in his 2009 survey: "Channels with synchronization errors ... are simply not adequately understood by current theory. Given the near-complete knowledge we have for channels with erasures and errors ... our lack of understanding about channels with synchronization errors is truly remarkable." Indeed, it took until 1999 for the first insdel codes with constant rate, constant distance, and constant alphabet size to be constructed and only since 2016 are there constructions of constant rate indel codes for asymptotically large noise rates. Even in the asymptotically large or small noise regime these codes are polynomially far from the optimal rate-distance tradeoff. This makes the understanding of insdel codes up to this work equivalent to what was known for regular ECCs after Forney introduced concatenated codes in his doctoral thesis 50 years ago. A straight forward application of our synchronization strings based indexing method gives a simple black-box construction which transforms any ECC into an equally efficient insdel code with only a small increase in the alphabet size. This instantly transfers much of the highly developed understanding for regular ECCs over large constant alphabets into the realm of insdel codes. Most notably, for the complete noise spectrum we obtain efficient "near-MDS" insdel codes which get arbitrarily close to the optimal rate-distance tradeoff given by the Singleton bound. In particular, for any δ ∈ (0,1) and ε > 0 we give insdel codes achieving a rate of 1 - ξ - ε over a constant size alphabet that efficiently correct a δ´ fraction of insertions or deletions. 

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3. 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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4. Synchronization Strings: Codes for Insertions and Deletions Approaching the Singleton Bound

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3468265  

   Haeupler, Bernhard; Shahrasbi, Amirbehshad (October 2021, Journal of the ACM)

   We introduce synchronization strings , which provide a novel way to efficiently deal with synchronization errors , i.e., insertions and deletions. Synchronization errors are strictly more general and much harder to cope with than more commonly considered Hamming-type errors , i.e., symbol substitutions and erasures. For every ε > 0, synchronization strings allow us to index a sequence with an ε -O(1) -size alphabet, such that one can efficiently transform k synchronization errors into (1 + ε)k Hamming-type errors . This powerful new technique has many applications. In this article, we focus on designing insdel codes , i.e., error correcting block codes (ECCs) for insertion-deletion channels. While ECCs for both Hamming-type errors and synchronization errors have been intensely studied, the latter has largely resisted progress. As Mitzenmacher puts it in his 2009 survey [30]: “ Channels with synchronization errors...are simply not adequately understood by current theory. Given the near-complete knowledge, we have for channels with erasures and errors...our lack of understanding about channels with synchronization errors is truly remarkable. ” Indeed, it took until 1999 for the first insdel codes with constant rate, constant distance, and constant alphabet size to be constructed and only since 2016 are there constructions of constant rate insdel codes for asymptotically large noise rates. Even in the asymptotically large or small noise regimes, these codes are polynomially far from the optimal rate-distance tradeoff. This makes the understanding of insdel codes up to this work equivalent to what was known for regular ECCs after Forney introduced concatenated codes in his doctoral thesis 50 years ago. A straightforward application of our synchronization strings-based indexing method gives a simple black-box construction that transforms any ECC into an equally efficient insdel code with only a small increase in the alphabet size. This instantly transfers much of the highly developed understanding for regular ECCs into the realm of insdel codes. Most notably, for the complete noise spectrum, we obtain efficient “near-MDS” insdel codes, which get arbitrarily close to the optimal rate-distance tradeoff given by the Singleton bound. In particular, for any δ ∈ (0,1) and ε > 0, we give a family of insdel codes achieving a rate of 1 - δ - ε over a constant-size alphabet that efficiently corrects a δ fraction of insertions or deletions. 

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5. Pseudorandom Linear Codes Are List-Decodable to Capacity

   Putterman, Aaron; Pyne, Edward (January 2024, 15th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference, ITCS 2024)

   We introduce a novel family of expander-based error correcting codes. These codes can be sampled with randomness linear in the block-length, and achieve list decoding capacity (among other local properties). Our expander-based codes can be made starting from any family of sufficiently low-bias codes, and as a consequence, we give the first construction of a family of algebraic codes that can be sampled with linear randomness and achieve list-decoding capacity. We achieve this by introducing the notion of a pseudorandom puncturing of a code, where we select n indices of a base code C ⊂ 𝔽_q^m in a correlated fashion. Concretely, whereas a random linear code (i.e. a truly random puncturing of the Hadamard code) requires O(n log(m)) random bits to sample, we sample a pseudorandom linear code with O(n + log (m)) random bits by instantiating our pseudorandom puncturing as a length n random walk on an exapnder graph on [m]. In particular, we extend a result of Guruswami and Mosheiff (FOCS 2022) and show that a pseudorandom puncturing of a small-bias code satisfies the same local properties as a random linear code with high probability. As a further application of our techniques, we also show that pseudorandom puncturings of Reed-Solomon codes are list-recoverable beyond the Johnson bound, extending a result of Lund and Potukuchi (RANDOM 2020). We do this by instead analyzing properties of codes with large distance, and show that pseudorandom puncturings still work well in this regime. 

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