Fri, 18-Feb-2022 / 2:00pm / https://stanford.zoom.us/j/92716427348
Landmark codes underpin reliable physical layer communication, e.g., Reed-Muller, BCH, Convolution, Turbo, LDPC and Polar codes: each is a linear code and represents a mathematical breakthrough. The impact on humanity is huge: each of these codes has been used in global wireless communication standards (satellite, WiFi, cellular). Reliability of communication over the classical additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel enables benchmarking and ranking of the different codes. In this paper, we construct KO codes, a computationally efficient family of deep-learning driven (encoder, decoder) pairs that outperform the state-of-the-art reliability performance on the standardized AWGN channel. KO codes beat state-of-the-art Reed-Muller and Polar codes, under the low-complexity successive cancellation decoding, in the challenging short-to-medium block length regime on the AWGN channel. We show that the gains of KO codes are primarily due to the nonlinear mapping of information bits directly to transmit symbols (bypassing modulation) and yet possess an efficient, high performance decoder. The key technical innovation that renders this possible is the design of a novel family of neural architectures inspired by the computation tree of the Kronecker Operation (KO) central to Reed-Muller and Polar codes. These architectures pave the way for the discovery of a much richer class of hitherto unexplored nonlinear algebraic structures. The code is available at https://github.com/deepcomm/KOcodes.
This is joint work with A. Makkuva, X. Liu, V. Jamali, S. Mahdavifar and S. Oh.
Pramod Viswanath received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering and computer science from University of California at Berkeley in 2000. From 2000 to 2001, he was a member of research staff at Flarion technologies, NJ. Since 2001, he is on the faculty at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in Electrical and Computer Engineering, where he currently is a professor.
He received the Eliahu Jury Award from the EECS department of UC Berkeley in 2000, the Bernard Friedman Prize from the mathematics department of UC Berkeley in 2000, a NSF CAREER award in 2002, the Xerox faculty research award from the college of engineering of UIUC in 2010 and the Best Paper Award at the Sigmetrics conference in 2015. He is a coauthor, with David Tse, of the text Fundamentals of Wireless Communication, which has been used in over 60 institutions around the world. He is coinventor of the opportunistic beamforming method and codesigner of Flash-OFDM communication algorithms used in all fourth-generation cellular systems.
He was an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory from 2006 to 2008, the Technical Program co-chair of the Information Theory Workshops in 2010 and 2015 and the Technical Program co-chair of the Allerton conference in 2007 and 2008.
His current research interests are in first principles design of blockchains. He is co-founder and CEO of Applied Protocol Research, a startup company developing full stack blockchain solutions.
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