Sharper Upper Bounds for Unbalanced Uniquely Decodable Code Pairs

Two sets $A, B \subseteq \{0, 1\}^n$ form a Uniquely Decodable Code Pair (UDCP) if every pair $a \in A$, $b \in B$ yields a distinct sum $a+b$, where the addition is over $\mathbb{Z}^n$. We show that every UDCP $A, B$, with $|A| = 2^{(1-\epsilon)n}$ and $|B| = 2^{\beta n}$, satisfies $\beta \leq 0.4228 +\sqrt{\epsilon}$. For sufficiently small $\epsilon$, this bound significantly improves previous bounds by Urbanke and Li~[Information Theory Workshop '98] and Ordentlich and Shayevitz~[2014, arXiv:1412.8415], which upper bound $\beta$ by $0.4921$ and $0.4798$, respectively, as $\epsilon$ approaches $0$.Comment: 11 pages; to appear at ISIT 201

An Upper Bound on the Sizes of Multiset-Union-Free Families

Let $\mathcal{F}_1$ and $\mathcal{F}_2$ be two families of subsets of an $n$-element set. We say that $\mathcal{F}_1$ and $\mathcal{F}_2$ are multiset-union-free if for any $A,B\in \mathcal{F}_1$ and $C,D\in \mathcal{F}_2$ the multisets $A\uplus C$ and $B\uplus D$ are different, unless both $A = B$ and $C= D$. We derive a new upper bound on the maximal sizes of multiset-union-free pairs, improving a result of Urbanke and Li.Comment: A shorter ISIT conference version titled "VC-Dimension Based Outer Bound on the Zero-Error Capacity of the Binary Adder Channel" is availabl

A Note on the Probability of Rectangles for Correlated Binary Strings

Consider two sequences of $n$ independent and identically distributed fair coin tosses, $X=(X_1,\ldots,X_n)$ and $Y=(Y_1,\ldots,Y_n)$, which are $\rho$-correlated for each $j$, i.e. $\mathbb{P}[X_j=Y_j] = {1+\rho\over 2}$. We study the question of how large (small) the probability $\mathbb{P}[X \in A, Y\in B]$ can be among all sets $A,B\subset\{0,1\}^n$ of a given cardinality. For sets $|A|,|B| = \Theta(2^n)$ it is well known that the largest (smallest) probability is approximately attained by concentric (anti-concentric) Hamming balls, and this can be proved via the hypercontractive inequality (reverse hypercontractivity). Here we consider the case of $|A|,|B| = 2^{\Theta(n)}$. By applying a recent extension of the hypercontractive inequality of Polyanskiy-Samorodnitsky (J. Functional Analysis, 2019), we show that Hamming balls of the same size approximately maximize $\mathbb{P}[X \in A, Y\in B]$ in the regime of $\rho \to 1$. We also prove a similar tight lower bound, i.e. show that for $\rho\to 0$ the pair of opposite Hamming balls approximately minimizes the probability $\mathbb{P}[X \in A, Y\in B]$

Zero-error communication over adder MAC

Adder MAC is a simple noiseless multiple-access channel (MAC), where if users send messages $X_1,\ldots,X_h\in \{0,1\}^n$, then the receiver receives $Y = X_1+\cdots+X_h$ with addition over $\mathbb{Z}$. Communication over the noiseless adder MAC has been studied for more than fifty years. There are two models of particular interest: uniquely decodable code tuples, and $B_h$-codes. In spite of the similarities between these two models, lower bounds and upper bounds of the optimal sum rate of uniquely decodable code tuple asymptotically match as number of users goes to infinity, while there is a gap of factor two between lower bounds and upper bounds of the optimal rate of $B_h$-codes. The best currently known $B_h$-codes for $h\ge 3$ are constructed using random coding. In this work, we study variants of the random coding method and related problems, in hope of achieving $B_h$-codes with better rate. Our contribution include the following. (1) We prove that changing the underlying distribution used in random coding cannot improve the rate. (2) We determine the rate of a list-decoding version of $B_h$-codes achieved by the random coding method. (3) We study several related problems about R\'{e}nyi entropy.Comment: An updated version of author's master thesi