Deterministic list decoding of Reed-Solomon codes

TL;DR

This paper presents a deterministic polynomial-time list decoding algorithm for Reed-Solomon codes over any finite field, improving upon prior randomized or field-dependent deterministic methods, and introduces a new polynomial factorization technique.

Contribution

It provides the first deterministic polynomial-time list decoding algorithm for Reed-Solomon codes over arbitrary finite fields, utilizing a novel polynomial factorization approach.

Findings

Deterministic list decoding from agreement rom Reed-Solomon codes.

Polynomial factorization algorithm with poly(ield size) complexity.

Applicable to any finite field, including prime fields.

Abstract

We show that Reed-Solomon codes of dimension $k$ and block length $n$ over any finite field $\mathbb{F}$ can be deterministically list decoded from agreement $\sqrt{(k-1)n}$ in time $\text{poly}(n, \log |\mathbb{F}|)$. Prior to this work, the list decoding algorithms for Reed-Solomon codes, from the celebrated results of Sudan and Guruswami-Sudan, were either randomized with time complexity $\text{poly}(n, \log |\mathbb{F}|)$ or were deterministic with time complexity depending polynomially on the characteristic of the underlying field. In particular, over a prime field $\mathbb{F}$, no deterministic algorithms running in time $\text{poly}(n, \log |\mathbb{F}|)$ were known for this problem. Our main technical ingredient is a deterministic algorithm for solving the bivariate polynomial factorization instances that appear in the algorithm of Sudan and Guruswami-Sudan with only a $\text{poly}(\log |\mathbb{F}|)$ dependence on the field size in its time complexity for every finite field $\mathbb{F}$. While the question of obtaining efficient deterministic algorithms for polynomial factorization over finite fields is a fundamental open problem even for univariate polynomials of degree $2$, we show that additional information from the received word can be used to obtain such an algorithm for instances that appear in the course of list decoding Reed-Solomon codes.