New Codes on High Dimensional Expanders

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new family of high-dimensional expander-based LDPC codes with low-density parity-check matrices, offering properties like local testability, linear distance and dimension, and novel embeddings of simplicial complexes.

Contribution

The paper presents a new construction of symmetric LDPC codes using high-dimensional expanders and simplicial complexes, with novel embeddings and analysis methods.

Findings

Codes are locally testable in certain parameter ranges.

Codes have linear distance and dimension in some regimes.

Embedding techniques improve rate bounds without constraint counting.

Abstract

We describe a new parameterized family of symmetric error-correcting codes with low-density parity-check matrices (LDPC). Our codes can be described in two seemingly different ways. First, in relation to Reed-Muller codes: our codes are functions on a subset of $\mathbb{F}^n$ whose restrictions to a prescribed set of affine lines has low degree. Alternatively, they are Tanner codes on high dimensional expanders, where the coordinates of the codeword correspond to triangles of a $2$-dimensional expander, such that around every edge the local view forms a Reed-Solomon codeword. For some range of parameters our codes are provably locally testable, and their dimension is some fixed power of the block length. For another range of parameters our codes have distance and dimension that are both linear in the block length, but we do not know if they are locally testable. The codes also have the multiplication property: the coordinate-wise product of two codewords is a codeword in a related code. The definition of the codes relies on the construction of a specific family of simplicial complexes which is a slight variant on the coset complexes of Kaufman and Oppenheim. We show a novel way to embed the triangles of these complexes into $\mathbb{F}^n$, with the property that links of edges embed as affine lines in $\mathbb{F}^n$. We rely on this embedding to lower bound the rate of these codes in a way that avoids constraint-counting and thereby achieves non-trivial rate even when the local codes themselves have arbitrarily small rate, and in particular below $1/2$.