A Reinforcement Learning Based Universal Sequence Design for Polar Codes
This work addresses the need for adaptable Polar code design for 6G standardization, representing an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of designing universal sequences for Polar codes in 6G applications by developing a reinforcement learning-based framework that scales to code lengths up to 2048, achieving competitive performance relative to 5G standards and up to a 0.2 dB gain over a baseline at N=2048.
To advance Polar code design for 6G applications, we develop a reinforcement learning-based universal sequence design framework that is extensible and adaptable to diverse channel conditions and decoding strategies. Crucially, our method scales to code lengths up to $2048$, making it suitable for use in standardization. Across all $(N,K)$ configurations supported in 5G, our approach achieves competitive performance relative to the NR sequence adopted in 5G and yields up to a 0.2 dB gain over the beta-expansion baseline at $N=2048$. We further highlight the key elements that enabled learning at scale: (i) incorporation of physical law constrained learning grounded in the universal partial order property of Polar codes, (ii) exploitation of the weak long term influence of decisions to limit lookahead evaluation, and (iii) joint multi-configuration optimization to increase learning efficiency.