Subspace polynomials and list decoding of Reed-Solomon codes

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, February 2007.Includes bibliographical references (p. 29-31).We show combinatorial limitations on efficient list decoding of Reed-Solomon codes beyond the Johnson and Guruswami-Sudan bounds [Joh62, Joh63, GS99]. In particular, we show that for any ... , there exist arbitrarily large fields ... * Existence: there exists a received word ... that agrees with a super-polynomial number of distinct degree K polynomials on ... points each; * Explicit: there exists a polynomial time constructible received word ... that agrees with a super-polynomial number of distinct degree K polynomials, on ... points each. Ill both cases, our results improve upon the previous state of the art, which was , NM/6 for the existence case [JH01], and a ... for the explicit one [GR,05b]. Furthermore, for 6 close to 1 our bound approaches the Guruswami-Sudan bound (which is ... ) and rules out the possibility of extending their efficient RS list decoding algorithm to any significantly larger decoding radius. Our proof method is surprisingly simple. We work with polynomials that vanish on subspaces of an extension field viewed as a vector space over the base field.(cont.) These subspace polynomials are a subclass of linearized polynomials that were studied by Ore [Ore33, Ore34] in the 1930s and by coding theorists. For us their main attraction is their sparsity and abundance of roots. We also complement our negative results by giving a list decoding algorithm for linearized polynomials beyond the Johnson-Guruswami-Sudan bounds.by Swastik Kopparty.S.M

Generalized List Decoding

This paper concerns itself with the question of list decoding for general adversarial channels, e.g., bit-flip ($\textsf{XOR}$) channels, erasure channels, $\textsf{AND}$ ($Z$-) channels, $\textsf{OR}$ channels, real adder channels, noisy typewriter channels, etc. We precisely characterize when exponential-sized (or positive rate) $(L-1)$-list decodable codes (where the list size $L$ is a universal constant) exist for such channels. Our criterion asserts that: "For any given general adversarial channel, it is possible to construct positive rate $(L-1)$-list decodable codes if and only if the set of completely positive tensors of order-$L$ with admissible marginals is not entirely contained in the order-$L$ confusability set associated to the channel." The sufficiency is shown via random code construction (combined with expurgation or time-sharing). The necessity is shown by 1. extracting equicoupled subcodes (generalization of equidistant code) from any large code sequence using hypergraph Ramsey's theorem, and 2. significantly extending the classic Plotkin bound in coding theory to list decoding for general channels using duality between the completely positive tensor cone and the copositive tensor cone. In the proof, we also obtain a new fact regarding asymmetry of joint distributions, which be may of independent interest. Other results include 1. List decoding capacity with asymptotically large $L$ for general adversarial channels; 2. A tight list size bound for most constant composition codes (generalization of constant weight codes); 3. Rederivation and demystification of Blinovsky's [Bli86] characterization of the list decoding Plotkin points (threshold at which large codes are impossible); 4. Evaluation of general bounds ([WBBJ]) for unique decoding in the error correction code setting