Edit Distance: Sketching, Streaming and Document Exchange

We show that in the document exchange problem, where Alice holds $x \in \{0,1\}^n$ and Bob holds $y \in \{0,1\}^n$, Alice can send Bob a message of size $O(K(\log^2 K+\log n))$ bits such that Bob can recover $x$ using the message and his input $y$ if the edit distance between $x$ and $y$ is no more than $K$, and output "error" otherwise. Both the encoding and decoding can be done in time $\tilde{O}(n+\mathsf{poly}(K))$. This result significantly improves the previous communication bounds under polynomial encoding/decoding time. We also show that in the referee model, where Alice and Bob hold $x$ and $y$ respectively, they can compute sketches of $x$ and $y$ of sizes $\mathsf{poly}(K \log n)$ bits (the encoding), and send to the referee, who can then compute the edit distance between $x$ and $y$ together with all the edit operations if the edit distance is no more than $K$, and output "error" otherwise (the decoding). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first result for sketching edit distance using $\mathsf{poly}(K \log n)$ bits. Moreover, the encoding phase of our sketching algorithm can be performed by scanning the input string in one pass. Thus our sketching algorithm also implies the first streaming algorithm for computing edit distance and all the edits exactly using $\mathsf{poly}(K \log n)$ bits of space.Comment: Full version of an article to be presented at the 57th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2016

Locally Decodable Codes with Randomized Encoding

We initiate a study of locally decodable codes with randomized encoding. Standard locally decodable codes are error correcting codes with a deterministic encoding function and a randomized decoding function, such that any desired message bit can be recovered with good probability by querying only a small number of positions in the corrupted codeword. This allows one to recover any message bit very efficiently in sub-linear or even logarithmic time. Besides this straightforward application, locally decodable codes have also found many other applications such as private information retrieval, secure multiparty computation, and average-case complexity. However, despite extensive research, the tradeoff between the rate of the code and the number of queries is somewhat disappointing. For example, the best known constructions still need super-polynomially long codeword length even with a logarithmic number of queries, and need a polynomial number of queries to achieve a constant rate. In this paper, we show that by using a randomized encoding, in several models we can achieve significantly better rate-query tradeoff. In addition, our codes work for both the standard Hamming errors, and the more general and harder edit errors.Comment: 23 page