Near-Optimal List-Recovery of Linear Code Families

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that random linear codes nearly achieve the theoretical limits of list-recovery capacity, providing new bounds and showing that certain Reed-Solomon codes also attain this capacity.

Contribution

It proves that random linear codes and punctured Reed-Solomon codes achieve list-recovery capacity with constant list size, and establishes near-optimal bounds on list size for linear codes.

Findings

Random linear codes achieve list-recovery capacity with constant list size.

Punctured Reed-Solomon codes also attain list-recovery capacity.

Established near-optimal bounds on list size for linear codes.

Abstract

We prove several results on linear codes achieving list-recovery capacity. We show that random linear codes achieve list-recovery capacity with constant output list size (independent of the alphabet size and length). That is, over alphabets of size at least $\ell^{\Omega(1/\varepsilon)}$, random linear codes of rate $R$ are $(1-R-\varepsilon, \ell, (\ell/\varepsilon)^{O(\ell/\varepsilon)})$-list-recoverable for all $R\in(0,1)$ and $\ell$. Together with a result of Levi, Mosheiff, and Shagrithaya, this implies that randomly punctured Reed-Solomon codes also achieve list-recovery capacity. We also prove that our output list size is near-optimal among all linear codes: all $(1-R-\varepsilon, \ell, L)$-list-recoverable linear codes must have $L\ge \ell^{\Omega(R/\varepsilon)}$. Our simple upper bound combines the Zyablov-Pinsker argument with recent bounds from Kopparty, Ron-Zewi, Saraf, Wootters, and Tamo on the maximum intersection of a "list-recovery ball" and a low-dimensional subspace with large distance. Our lower bound is inspired by a recent lower bound of Chen and Zhang.