Rateless Autoencoder Codes: Trading off Decoding Delay and Reliability

TL;DR

This paper introduces rateless autoencoder codes that enable decoding messages progressively, balancing delay and reliability, and outperforming traditional autoencoders in scenarios requiring early decoding.

Contribution

It presents a novel rateless autoencoder design with dropout strategies, allowing flexible trade-offs between decoding delay and reliability.

Findings

Outperforms conventional autoencoders in early decoding scenarios

Provides a graceful reliability improvement with additional received symbols

Enables flexible delay-reliability trade-offs during transmission

Abstract

Most of today's communication systems are designed to target reliable message recovery after receiving the entire encoded message (codeword). However, in many practical scenarios, the transmission process may be interrupted before receiving the complete codeword. This paper proposes a novel rateless autoencoder (AE)-based code design suitable for decoding the transmitted message before the noisy codeword is fully received. Using particular dropout strategies applied during the training process, rateless AE codes allow to trade off between decoding delay and reliability, providing a graceful improvement of the latter with each additionally received codeword symbol. The proposed rateless AEs significantly outperform the conventional AE designs for scenarios where it is desirable to trade off reliability for lower decoding delay.