TY - JOUR
T1 - Learning to decode
T2 - 34th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2020
AU - Habib, Salman
AU - Beemer, Allison
AU - Kliewer, Jörg
N1 - Funding Information:
Funding in direct support of this work: NSF grant ECCS-1711056 and by the Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory under Cooperative Agreement Number W911NF-17-2-0183. We thank the anonymous reviewers and the meta reviewer for their comments and suggestions to improve the paper.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Neural information processing systems foundation. All rights reserved.
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - We show in this work that reinforcement learning can be successfully applied to decoding short to moderate length sparse graph-based channel codes. Specifically, we focus on low-density parity check (LDPC) codes, which for example have been standardized in the context of 5G cellular communication systems due to their excellent error correcting performance. These codes are typically decoded via belief propagation iterative decoding on the corresponding bipartite (Tanner) graph of the code via flooding, i.e., all check and variable nodes in the Tanner graph are updated at once. In contrast, in this paper we utilize a sequential update policy which selects the optimum check node (CN) scheduling in order to improve decoding performance. In particular, we model the CN update process as a multi-armed bandit process with dependent arms and employ a Q-learning scheme for optimizing the CN scheduling policy. In order to reduce the learning complexity, we propose a novel graph-induced CN clustering approach to partition the state space in such a way that dependencies between clusters are minimized. Our results show that compared to other decoding approaches from the literature, the proposed reinforcement learning scheme not only significantly improves the decoding performance, but also reduces the decoding complexity dramatically once the scheduling policy is learned.
AB - We show in this work that reinforcement learning can be successfully applied to decoding short to moderate length sparse graph-based channel codes. Specifically, we focus on low-density parity check (LDPC) codes, which for example have been standardized in the context of 5G cellular communication systems due to their excellent error correcting performance. These codes are typically decoded via belief propagation iterative decoding on the corresponding bipartite (Tanner) graph of the code via flooding, i.e., all check and variable nodes in the Tanner graph are updated at once. In contrast, in this paper we utilize a sequential update policy which selects the optimum check node (CN) scheduling in order to improve decoding performance. In particular, we model the CN update process as a multi-armed bandit process with dependent arms and employ a Q-learning scheme for optimizing the CN scheduling policy. In order to reduce the learning complexity, we propose a novel graph-induced CN clustering approach to partition the state space in such a way that dependencies between clusters are minimized. Our results show that compared to other decoding approaches from the literature, the proposed reinforcement learning scheme not only significantly improves the decoding performance, but also reduces the decoding complexity dramatically once the scheduling policy is learned.
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M3 - Conference article
AN - SCOPUS:85108416868
SN - 1049-5258
VL - 2020-December
JO - Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems
JF - Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems
Y2 - 6 December 2020 through 12 December 2020
ER -