Unified Error Correction Code Transformer with Low Complexity

TL;DR

This paper introduces a unified, low-complexity Transformer-based error correction decoder for 6G wireless systems that efficiently handles multiple codes with reduced computational cost and improved accuracy.

Contribution

A novel unified Transformer decoder with a low-rank attention module and sparse masking, enabling multi-code decoding with significantly reduced complexity and enhanced performance.

Findings

Reduces computational complexity by 86%

Outperforms existing decoders in accuracy

Supports multiple code types within a single framework

Abstract

Channel coding is vital for reliable sixth-generation (6G) data transmission, employing diverse error correction codes for various application scenarios. Traditional decoders require dedicated hardware for each code, leading to high hardware costs. Recently, artificial intelligence (AI)-driven approaches, such as the error correction code Transformer (ECCT) and its enhanced version, the foundation error correction code Transformer (FECCT), have been proposed to reduce the hardware cost by leveraging the Transformer to decode multiple codes. However, their excessively high computational complexity of $\mathcal{O}(N^2)$ due to the self-attention mechanism in the Transformer limits scalability, where $N$ represents the sequence length. To reduce computational complexity, we propose a unified Transformer-based decoder that handles multiple linear block codes within a single framework. Specifically, a standardized unit is employed to align code length and code rate across different code types, while a redesigned low-rank unified attention module, with computational complexity of $\mathcal{O}(N)$, is shared across various heads in the Transformer. Additionally, a sparse mask, derived from the parity-check matrix's sparsity, is introduced to enhance the decoder's ability to capture inherent constraints between information and parity-check bits, improving decoding accuracy and further reducing computational complexity by $86\%$. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed unified Transformer-based decoder outperforms existing methods and provides a high-performance, low-complexity solution for next-generation wireless communication systems.