Relaxed Local Correctability from Local Testing

We cement the intuitive connection between relaxed local correctability and local testing by presenting a concrete framework for building a relaxed locally correctable code from any family of linear locally testable codes with sufficiently high rate. When instantiated using the locally testable codes of Dinur et al. (STOC 2022), this framework yields the first asymptotically good relaxed locally correctable and decodable codes with polylogarithmic query complexity, which finally closes the superpolynomial gap between query lower and upper bounds. Our construction combines high-rate locally testable codes of various sizes to produce a code that is locally testable at every scale: we can gradually "zoom in" to any desired codeword index, and a local tester at each step certifies that the next, smaller restriction of the input has low error. Our codes asymptotically inherit the rate and distance of any locally testable code used in the final step of the construction. Therefore, our technique also yields nonexplicit relaxed locally correctable codes with polylogarithmic query complexity that have rate and distance approaching the Gilbert-Varshamov bound.Comment: 18 page

On list recovery of high-rate tensor codes

We continue the study of list recovery properties of high-rate tensor codes, initiated by Hemenway, Ron-Zewi, and Wootters (FOCS’17). In that work it was shown that the tensor product of an efficient (poly-time) high-rate globally list recoverable code is approximately locally list recoverable, as well as globally list recoverable in probabilistic near-linear time. This was used in turn to give the first capacity-achieving list decodable codes with (1) local list decoding algorithms, and with (2) probabilistic near-linear time global list decoding algorithms. This also yielded constant-rate codes approaching the Gilbert-Varshamov bound with probabilistic near-linear time global unique decoding algorithms. In the current work we obtain the following results: 1. The tensor product of an efficient (poly-time) high-rate globally list recoverable code is globally list recoverable in deterministic near-linear time. This yields in turn the first capacity-achieving list decodable codes with deterministic near-linear time global list decoding algorithms. It also gives constant-rate codes approaching the Gilbert-Varshamov bound with deterministic near-linear time global unique decoding algorithms. 2. If the base code is additionally locally correctable, then the tensor product is (genuinely) locally list recoverable. This yields in turn (non-explicit) constant-rate codes approaching the Gilbert- Varshamov bound that are locally correctable with query complexity and running time No(1). This improves over prior work by Gopi et. al. (SODA’17; IEEE Transactions on Information Theory’18) that only gave query complexity N" with rate that is exponentially small in 1/". 3. A nearly-tight combinatorial lower bound on output list size for list recovering high-rate tensor codes. This bound implies in turn a nearly-tight lower bound of N (1/ log logN) on the product of query complexity and output list size for locally list recovering high-rate tensor codes.</p

High rate locally-correctable and locally-testable codes with sub-polynomial query complexity

In this work, we construct the first locally-correctable codes (LCCs), and locally-testable codes (LTCs) with constant rate, constant relative distance, and sub-polynomial query complexity. Specifically, we show that there exist binary LCCs and LTCs with block length $n$, constant rate (which can even be taken arbitrarily close to 1), constant relative distance, and query complexity $\exp(\tilde{O}(\sqrt{\log n}))$. Previously such codes were known to exist only with $\Omega(n^{\beta})$ query complexity (for constant $\beta > 0$), and there were several, quite different, constructions known. Our codes are based on a general distance-amplification method of Alon and Luby~\cite{AL96_codes}. We show that this method interacts well with local correctors and testers, and obtain our main results by applying it to suitably constructed LCCs and LTCs in the non-standard regime of \emph{sub-constant relative distance}. Along the way, we also construct LCCs and LTCs over large alphabets, with the same query complexity $\exp(\tilde{O}(\sqrt{\log n}))$, which additionally have the property of approaching the Singleton bound: they have almost the best-possible relationship between their rate and distance. This has the surprising consequence that asking for a large alphabet error-correcting code to further be an LCC or LTC with $\exp(\tilde{O}(\sqrt{\log n}))$ query complexity does not require any sacrifice in terms of rate and distance! Such a result was previously not known for any $o(n)$ query complexity. Our results on LCCs also immediately give locally-decodable codes (LDCs) with the same parameters

Outlaw distributions and locally decodable codes

Locally decodable codes (LDCs) are error correcting codes that allow for decoding of a single message bit using a small number of queries to a corrupted encoding. Despite decades of study, the optimal trade-off between query complexity and codeword length is far from understood. In this work, we give a new characterization of LDCs using distributions over Boolean functions whose expectation is hard to approximate (in~$L_\infty$~norm) with a small number of samples. We coin the term `outlaw distributions' for such distributions since they `defy' the Law of Large Numbers. We show that the existence of outlaw distributions over sufficiently `smooth' functions implies the existence of constant query LDCs and vice versa. We give several candidates for outlaw distributions over smooth functions coming from finite field incidence geometry, additive combinatorics and from hypergraph (non)expanders. We also prove a useful lemma showing that (smooth) LDCs which are only required to work on average over a random message and a random message index can be turned into true LDCs at the cost of only constant factors in the parameters.Comment: A preliminary version of this paper appeared in the proceedings of ITCS 201

Rate Amplification and Query-Efficient Distance Amplification for Linear LCC and LDC

The main contribution of this work is a rate amplification procedure for LCC. Our procedure converts any q-query linear LCC, having rate ? and, say, constant distance to an asymptotically good LCC with q^poly(1/?) queries. Our second contribution is a distance amplification procedure for LDC that converts any linear LDC with distance ? and, say, constant rate to an asymptotically good LDC. The query complexity only suffers a multiplicative overhead that is roughly equal to the query complexity of a length 1/? asymptotically good LDC. This improves upon the poly(1/?) overhead obtained by the AEL distance amplification procedure [Alon and Luby, 1996; Alon et al., 1995]. Our work establishes that the construction of asymptotically good LDC and LCC is reduced, with a minor overhead in query complexity, to the problem of constructing a vanishing rate linear LCC and a (rapidly) vanishing distance linear LDC, respectively

Fast Reed-Solomon Interactive Oracle Proofs of Proximity

The family of Reed-Solomon (RS) codes plays a prominent role in the construction of quasilinear probabilistically checkable proofs (PCPs) and interactive oracle proofs (IOPs) with perfect zero knowledge and polylogarithmic verifiers. The large concrete computational complexity required to prove membership in RS codes is one of the biggest obstacles to deploying such PCP/IOP systems in practice. To advance on this problem we present a new interactive oracle proof of proximity (IOPP) for RS codes; we call it the Fast RS IOPP (FRI) because (i) it resembles the ubiquitous Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) and (ii) the arithmetic complexity of its prover is strictly linear and that of the verifier is strictly logarithmic (in comparison, FFT arithmetic complexity is quasi-linear but not strictly linear). Prior RS IOPPs and PCPs of proximity (PCPPs) required super-linear proving time even for polynomially large query complexity. For codes of block-length N, the arithmetic complexity of the (interactive) FRI prover is less than 6 * N, while the (interactive) FRI verifier has arithmetic complexity <= 21 * log N, query complexity 2 * log N and constant soundness - words that are delta-far from the code are rejected with probability min{delta * (1-o(1)),delta_0} where delta_0 is a positive constant that depends mainly on the code rate. The particular combination of query complexity and soundness obtained by FRI is better than that of the quasilinear PCPP of [Ben-Sasson and Sudan, SICOMP 2008], even with the tighter soundness analysis of [Ben-Sasson et al., STOC 2013; ECCC 2016]; consequently, FRI is likely to facilitate better concretely efficient zero knowledge proof and argument systems. Previous concretely efficient PCPPs and IOPPs suffered a constant multiplicative factor loss in soundness with each round of "proof composition" and thus used at most O(log log N) rounds. We show that when delta is smaller than the unique decoding radius of the code, FRI suffers only a negligible additive loss in soundness. This observation allows us to increase the number of "proof composition" rounds to Theta(log N) and thereby reduce prover and verifier running time for fixed soundness