From Polar to Reed-Muller Codes: a Technique to Improve the Finite-Length Performance

We explore the relationship between polar and RM codes and we describe a coding scheme which improves upon the performance of the standard polar code at practical block lengths. Our starting point is the experimental observation that RM codes have a smaller error probability than polar codes under MAP decoding. This motivates us to introduce a family of codes that "interpolates" between RM and polar codes, call this family ${\mathcal C}_{\rm inter} = \{C_{\alpha} : \alpha \in [0, 1]\}$, where $C_{\alpha} \big |_{\alpha = 1}$ is the original polar code, and $C_{\alpha} \big |_{\alpha = 0}$ is an RM code. Based on numerical observations, we remark that the error probability under MAP decoding is an increasing function of $\alpha$. MAP decoding has in general exponential complexity, but empirically the performance of polar codes at finite block lengths is boosted by moving along the family ${\mathcal C}_{\rm inter}$ even under low-complexity decoding schemes such as, for instance, belief propagation or successive cancellation list decoder. We demonstrate the performance gain via numerical simulations for transmission over the erasure channel as well as the Gaussian channel.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures, in IEEE Transactions on Communications, 2014 and in ISIT'1

Learning to Construct Nested Polar Codes: An Attention-Based Set-to-Element Model

As capacity-achieving codes under successive cancellation (SC) decoding, nested polar codes have been adopted in 5G enhanced mobile broadband. To optimize the performance of the code construction under practical decoding, e.g. SC list (SCL) decoding, artificial intelligence based methods have been explored in the literature. However, the structure of nested polar codes has not been fully exploited for code construction. To address this issue, this letter transforms the original combinatorial optimization problem for the construction of nested polar codes into a policy optimization problem for sequential decision, and proposes an attention-based set-to-element model, which incorporates the nested structure into the policy design. Based on the proposed architecture for the policy, a gradient based algorithm for code construction and a divide-and-conquer strategy for parallel implementation are further developed. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed construction outperforms the state-of-the-art nested polar codes for SCL decoding