Search for: All records

This paper introduces extensions to data-driven polar decoders, enabling list decoding and accommodating asymmetric input distributions. These are crucial steps to develop data-driven codes that 1) achieve capacity and 2) are competitive in moderate block lengths. We commence by integrating list de- coding into the data-driven polar codes, which significantly alleviates the inherent error propagation issues associated with successive cancellation decoding. Secondly, we expand the applicability of these codes to channels with stationary, non-uniform input distributions by incorporating the Honda-Yamamoto scheme. Both modifications are computationally efficient and do not require an explicit channel model. Numerical results validate the efficacy of our contributions, which offer a robust and versatile coding mechanism for various channel conditions. 

Recently, the authors showed that Reed–Muller (RM) codes achieve capacity on binary memoryless symmetric (BMS) channels with respect to bit error rate. This paper extends that work by showing that RM codes defined on non-binary fields, known as generalized RM codes, achieve capacity on sufficiently symmetric non-binary channels with respect to symbol error rate. The new proof also simplifies the previous approach (for BMS channels) in a variety of ways that may be of independent interest. 

This paper considers the design and decoding of polar codes for general classical-quantum (CQ) channels. It focuses on decoding via belief-propagation with quantum messages (BPQM) and, in particular, the idea of paired-measurement BPQM (PM-BPQM) decoding. Since the PM-BPQM decoder admits a classical density evolution (DE) analysis, one can use DE to design a polar code for any CQ channel and then efficiently compute the trade-off between code rate and error probability. We have also implemented and tested a classical simulation of our PM-BPQM decoder for polar codes. While the decoder can be implemented efficiently on a quantum computer, simulating the decoder on a classical computer actually has exponential complexity. Thus, simulation results for the decoder are somewhat limited and are included primarily to validate our theoretical results. 

In this work, a novel data-driven methodology for designing polar codes is proposed. The methodology is suitable for the case where the channel is given as a ”black-box” and the designer has access to the channel for generating observations of its inputs and outputs, but does not have access to the explicit channel model. The methodology consists of two components: (1) a neural estimation of the sufficient statistic of the channel outputs using recent advances in Kullback Leibler (KL) estimation, and (2) a neural successive cancellation (NSC) decoder using three neural networks that replace the core elements of the successive cancellation (SC) decoder. The parameters of the neural networks are determined during a training phase where the mutual information of the effective channels is estimated. We demonstrate the performance of the algorithm on memoryless channels and on finite state channels. Then, we compare the results with the optimal decoding given by the SC and SC trellis decoders, respectively. 

This paper considers the design and decoding of polar codes for general classical-quantum (CQ) channels. It focuses on decoding via belief-propagation with quantum messages (BPQM) and, in particular, the idea of paired-measurement BPQM (PM-BPQM) decoding. Since the PM-BPQM decoder admits a classical density evolution (DE) analysis, one can use DE to design a polar code for any CQ channel and then efficiently compute the trade-off between code rate and error probability. We have also implemented and tested a classical simulation of our PM-BPQM decoder for polar codes. While the decoder can be implemented efficiently on a quantum computer, simulating the decoder on a classical computer actually has exponential complexity. Thus, simulation results for the decoder are somewhat limited and are included primarily to validate our theoretical results. 

Belief propagation (BP) is a classical algorithm that approximates the marginal distribution associated with a factor graph by passing messages between adjacent nodes in the graph. It gained popularity in the 1990’s as a powerful decoding algorithm for LDPC codes. In 2016, Renes introduced a belief propagation with quantum messages (BPQM) and described how it could be used to decode classical codes defined by tree factor graphs that are sent over the classical-quantum pure-state channel. In this work, we propose an extension of BPQM to general binary-input symmetric classical-quantum (BSCQ) channels based on the implementation of a symmetric "paired measurement". While this new paired-measurement BPQM (PMBPQM) approach is suboptimal in general, it provides a concrete BPQM decoder that can be implemented with local operations. Finally, we demonstrate that density evolution can be used to analyze the performance of PMBPQM on tree factor graphs. As an application, we compute noise thresholds of some LDPC codes with BPQM decoding for a class of BSCQ channels.