10.1ITJun 29
Design of Outage-Limit-Approaching Protograph LDPC Codes via Generalized RootchecksInki Kim, Hyuntae Ahn, Yongjune Kim et al.
This paper presents a new protograph-based LDPC code design framework that simultaneously achieves full diversity over block-fading channels (BFCs) and near-capacity performance over additive white Gaussian noise channels. By leveraging a Boolean approximation-based analysis-Diversity Evolution-we derive structural constraints with generalized rootchecks that guarantee full diversity. Building on these constraints, we propose a diversity-aligned protograph template tailored for the two-block BFC (M=2) that ensures full diversity under iterative belief propagation decoding. Furthermore, a genetic algorithm guided by density evolution is employed to optimize the protograph edges within this family for improved coding gain. The resulting codes, termed DA-GRP-LDPC codes, simultaneously achieve full diversity and enhanced coding gain, reaching a 0.8 dB gap to the outage limit for the two-block BFC at a block length of 16,896. This demonstrates that the proposed framework effectively bridges the gap between diversity optimality in non-ergodic channels and high coding gain in ergodic channels.
6.4ITMay 8
Spectral-Aligned Pruning for Universal Error-Correcting Code TransformersSanghyeon Cho, Taewoo Park, Seong-Joon Park et al.
Universal channel decoders based on transformers-such as the Foundation Error Correction Code Transformer (FECCT)-achieve competitive decoding performance across diverse code families with a single shared backbone, optionally followed by code-specific finetuning. However, the high computational complexity and large parameter footprint of FECCT present substantial obstacles to practical deployment. To address these challenges, we investigate structured pruning for FECCT and propose Spectral-Aligned Pruning (SAP), a structure-aware framework that enables cross-code reuse of structured pruning masks by leveraging the spectrum of the corresponding bipartite graph. SAP is grounded in classical graph analysis of codes: the two algebraically largest adjacency eigenvalues provide compact spectral proxies for degree scale, expansion ratio, and minimum-distance lower bounds. These quantities are directly relevant to decoding performance: degree scale reflects how densely codeword bits and parity checks are connected; expansion ratio influences how information propagates across the bipartite graph; and minimum distance characterizes codeword separation. Based on this connection, SAP uses these two leading eigenvalues as a lightweight code signature for pruning-mask retrieval. Empirically, this two-dimensional signature yields stable library selection equivalent to higher-dimensional spectral signatures in our evaluation. After pruning, SAP performs per-code recovery via parameter-efficient low-rank adaptation (LoRA), enabling a shared pruned backbone while storing only small code-specific adapter parameters. Experiments across diverse codes show that SAP achieves decoding performance comparable to dedicated per-code pruning, while enabling substantial reductions in computational cost and model memory footprint through kernel-level structured pruning.