arXiv subjects

Itzhak Tamo

Publications and source records attributed to Itzhak Tamo.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Error Detection and Correction in Communication Networks

Let $G$ be a connected graph on $n$ vertices and $C$ be an $(n,k,d)$ code with $d\ge 2$, defined on the alphabet set $\{0,1\}^m$. Suppose that for $1\le i\le n$, the $i$-th vertex of $G$ holds an input symbol $x_i\in\{0,1\}^m$ and let $\vec{x}=(x_1,\ldots,x_n)\in\{0,1\}^{mn}$ be the input vector formed by those symbols. Assume that each vertex of $G$ can communicate with its neighbors by transmitting messages along the edges, and these vertices must decide deterministically, according to a predetermined communication protocol, that whether $\vec{x}\in C$. Then what is the minimum communication cost to solve this problem? Moreover, if $\vec{x}\not\in C$, say, there is less than $\lfloor(d-1)/2\rfloor$ input errors among the $x_i$'s, then what is the minimum communication cost for error correction? In this paper we initiate the study of the two problems mentioned above. For the error detection problem, we obtain two lower bounds on the communication cost as functions of $n,k,d,m$, and our bounds are tight for several graphs and codes. For the error correction problem, we design a protocol which can efficiently correct a single input error when $G$ is a cycle and $C$ is a repetition code. We also present several interesting problems for further research.

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arXiv2020

Degenerate Turán densities of sparse hypergraphs

For fixed integers $r>k\ge 2,e\ge 3$, let $f_r(n,er-(e-1)k,e)$ be the maximum number of edges in an $r$-uniform hypergraph in which the union of any $e$ distinct edges contains at least $er-(e-1)k+1$ vertices. A classical result of Brown, Erdős and Sós in 1973 showed that $f_r(n,er-(e-1)k,e)=Θ(n^k).$ The degenerate Turán density is defined to be the limit (if it exists) $$π(r,k,e):=\lim_{n\rightarrow\infty}\frac{f_r(n,er-(e-1)k,e)}{n^k}.$$ Extending a recent result of Glock for the special case of $r=3,k=2,e=3$, we show that $$π(r,2,3):=\lim_{n\rightarrow\infty}\frac{f_r(n,3r-4,3)}{n^2}=\frac{1}{r^2-r-1}$$ for arbitrary fixed $r\ge 4$. For the more general cases $r>k\ge 3$, we show that $$\frac{1}{r^k-r}\le\liminf_{n\rightarrow\infty}\frac{f_r(n,3r-2k,3)}{n^k}\le\limsup_{n\rightarrow\infty}\frac{f_r(n,3r-2k,3)}{n^k}\le \frac{1}{k!\binom{r}{k}-\frac{k!}{2}}.$$ The main difficulties in proving these results are the constructions establishing the lower bounds. The first construction is recursive and purely combinatorial, and is based on a (carefully designed) approximate induced decomposition of the complete graph, whereas the second construction is algebraic, and is proved by a newly defined matrix property which we call {\it strongly 3-perfect hashing}.

math.CO↗

arXiv2020

The hat guessing number of graphs

Consider the following hat guessing game: $n$ players are placed on $n$ vertices of a graph, each wearing a hat whose color is arbitrarily chosen from a set of $q$ possible colors. Each player can see the hat colors of his neighbors, but not his own hat color. All of the players are asked to guess their own hat colors simultaneously, according to a predetermined guessing strategy and the hat colors they see, where no communication between them is allowed. Given a graph $G$, its hat guessing number ${\rm{HG}}(G)$ is the largest integer $q$ such that there exists a guessing strategy guaranteeing at least one correct guess for any hat assignment of $q$ possible colors. In 2008, Butler et al. asked whether the hat guessing number of the complete bipartite graph $K_{n,n}$ is at least some fixed positive (fractional) power of $n$. We answer this question affirmatively, showing that for sufficiently large $n$, the complete $r$-partite graph $K_{n,\ldots,n}$ satisfies ${\rm{HG}}(K_{n,\ldots,n})=Ω(n^{\frac{r-1}{r}-o(1)})$. Our guessing strategy is based on a probabilistic construction and other combinatorial ideas, and can be extended to show that ${\rm{HG}}(\vec{C}_{n,\ldots,n})=Ω(n^{\frac{1}{r}-o(1)})$, where $\vec{C}_{n,\ldots,n}$ is the blow-up of a directed $r$-cycle, and where for directed graphs each player sees only the hat colors of his outneighbors.

math.CO↗

arXiv2019

Combinatorial list-decoding of Reed-Solomon codes beyond the Johnson radius

List-decoding of Reed-Solomon (RS) codes beyond the so called Johnson radius has been one of the main open questions since the work of Guruswami and Sudan. It is now known by the work of Rudra and Wootters, using techniques from high dimensional probability, that over large enough alphabets most RS codes are indeed list-decodable beyond this radius. In this paper we take a more combinatorial approach which allows us to determine the precise relation (up to the exact constant) between the decoding radius and the list size. We prove a generalized Singleton bound for a given list size, and conjecture that the bound is tight for most RS codes over large enough finite fields. We also show that the conjecture holds true for list sizes $2 \text{ and }3$, and as a by product show that most RS codes with a rate of at least $1/9$ are list-decodable beyond the Johnson radius. Lastly, we give the first explicit construction of such RS codes. The main tools used in the proof are a new type of linear dependency between codewords of a code that are contained in a small Hamming ball, and the notion of cycle space from Graph Theory. Both of them have not been used before in the context of list-decoding.

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arXiv2019

Gradient Coding from Cyclic MDS Codes and Expander Graphs

Gradient coding is a technique for straggler mitigation in distributed learning. In this paper we design novel gradient codes using tools from classical coding theory, namely, cyclic MDS codes, which compare favorably with existing solutions, both in the applicable range of parameters and in the complexity of the involved algorithms. Second, we introduce an approximate variant of the gradient coding problem, in which we settle for approximate gradient computation instead of the exact one. This approach enables graceful degradation, i.e., the $\ell_2$ error of the approximate gradient is a decreasing function of the number of stragglers. Our main result is that normalized adjacency matrices of expander graphs yield excellent approximate gradient codes, which enable significantly less computation compared to exact gradient coding, and guarantee faster convergence than trivial solutions under standard assumptions. We experimentally test our approach on Amazon EC2, and show that the generalization error of approximate gradient coding is very close to the full gradient while requiring significantly less computation from the workers.

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arXiv2019

Private Information Retrieval in Graph Based Replication Systems

In a Private Information Retrieval (PIR) protocol, a user can download a file from a database without revealing the identity of the file to each individual server. A PIR protocol is called $t$-private if the identity of the file remains concealed even if $t$ of the servers collude. Graph based replication is a simple technique, which is prevalent in both theory and practice, for achieving erasure robustness in storage systems. In this technique each file is replicated on two or more storage servers, giving rise to a (hyper-)graph structure. In this paper we study private information retrieval protocols in graph based replication systems. The main interest of this work is maximizing the parameter $t$, and in particular, understanding the structure of the colluding sets which emerge in a given graph. Our main contribution is a $2$-replication scheme which guarantees perfect privacy from acyclic sets in the graph, and guarantees partial-privacy in the presence of cycles. Furthermore, by providing an upper bound, it is shown that the PIR rate of this scheme is at most a factor of two from its optimal value for an important family of graphs. Lastly, we extend our results to larger replication factors and to graph-based coding, which is a similar technique with smaller storage overhead and larger PIR rate.

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arXiv2018

Error correction based on partial information

We consider the decoding of linear and array codes from errors when we are only allowed to download a part of the codeword. More specifically, suppose that we have encoded $k$ data symbols using an $(n,k)$ code with code length $n$ and dimension $k.$ During storage, some of the codeword coordinates might be corrupted by errors. We aim to recover the original data by reading the corrupted codeword with a limit on the transmitting bandwidth, namely, we can only download an $α$ proportion of the corrupted codeword. For a given $α,$ our objective is to design a code and a decoding scheme such that we can recover the original data from the largest possible number of errors. A naive scheme is to read $αn$ coordinates of the codeword. This method used in conjunction with MDS codes guarantees recovery from any $\lfloor(αn-k)/2\rfloor$ errors. In this paper we show that we can instead read an $α$ proportion from each of the codeword's coordinates. For a well-designed MDS code, this method can guarantee recovery from $\lfloor (n-k/α)/2 \rfloor$ errors, which is $1/α$ times more than the naive method, and is also the maximum number of errors that an $(n,k)$ code can correct by downloading only an $α$ proportion of the codeword. We present two families of such optimal constructions and decoding schemes. One is a Reed-Solomon code with evaluation points in a subfield and the other is based on Folded Reed-Solomon codes. We further show that both code constructions attain asymptotically optimal list decoding radius when downloading only a part of the corrupted codeword. We also construct an ensemble of random codes that with high probability approaches the upper bound on the number of correctable errors when the decoder downloads an $α$ proportion of the corrupted codeword.

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arXiv2018

The repair problem for Reed-Solomon codes: Optimal repair of single and multiple erasures, asymptotically optimal node size

The repair problem in distributed storage addresses recovery of the data encoded using an erasure code, for instance, a Reed-Solomon (RS) code. We consider the problem of repairing a single node or multiple nodes in RS-coded storage systems using the smallest possible amount of inter-nodal communication. According to the cut-set bound, communication cost of repairing $h\ge 1$ failed nodes for an $(n,k=n-r)$ MDS code using $d$ helper nodes is at least $dhl/(d+h-k),$ where $l$ is the size of the node. Guruswami and Wootters (2016) initiated the study of efficient repair of RS codes, showing that they can be repaired using a smaller bandwidth than under the trivial approach. At the same time, their work as well as follow-up papers stopped short of constructing RS codes (or any scalar MDS codes) that meet the cut-set bound with equality. In this paper we construct families of RS codes that achieve the cutset bound for repair of one or several nodes. In the single-node case, we present RS codes of length $n$ over the field $\mathbb{F}_{q^l},l=\exp((1+o(1))n\log n)$ that meet the cut-set bound. We also prove an almost matching lower bound on $l$, showing that super-exponential scaling is both necessary and sufficient for scalar MDS codes to achieve the cut-set bound using linear repair schemes. For the case of multiple nodes, we construct a family of RS codes that achieve the cut-set bound universally for the repair of any $h=2,3,\dots$ failed nodes from any subset of $d$ helper nodes, $k\le d\le n-h.$ For a fixed number of parities $r$ the node size of the constructed codes is close to the smallest possible node size for codes with such properties.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2018

A Bound on the Shannon Capacity via a Linear Programming Variation

We prove an upper bound on the Shannon capacity of a graph via a linear programming variation. We show that our bound can outperform both the Lovász theta number and the Haemers minimum rank bound. As a by-product, we also obtain a new upper bound on the broadcast rate of Index Coding.

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arXiv2018

Optimal LRC codes for all lenghts n <= q

A family of distance-optimal LRC codes from certain subcodes of $q$-ary Reed-Solomon codes, proposed by I.~Tamo and A.~Barg in 2014, assumes that the code length $n$ is a multiple of $r+1.$ By shortening codes from this family, we show that it is possible to lift this assumption, still obtaining distance-optimal codes.

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arXiv2018

Combinatorial Alphabet-Dependent Bounds for Locally Recoverable Codes

Locally recoverable (LRC) codes have recently been a focus point of research in coding theory due to their theoretical appeal and applications in distributed storage systems. In an LRC code, any erased symbol of a codeword can be recovered by accessing only a small number of other symbols. For LRC codes over a small alphabet (such as binary), the optimal rate-distance trade-off is unknown. We present several new combinatorial bounds on LRC codes including the locality-aware sphere packing and Plotkin bounds. We also develop an approach to linear programming (LP) bounds on LRC codes. The resulting LP bound gives better estimates in examples than the other upper bounds known in the literature. Further, we provide the tightest known upper bound on the rate of linear LRC codes with a given relative distance, an improvement over the previous best known bounds.

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arXiv2017

MDS Code Constructions with Small Sub-packetization and Near-optimal Repair Bandwidth

This paper addresses the problem of constructing MDS codes that enable exact repair of each code block with small repair bandwidth, which refers to the total amount of information flow from the remaining code blocks during the repair process. This problem naturally arises in the context of distributed storage systems as the node repair problem [7]. The constructions of exact-repairable MDS codes with optimal repair-bandwidth require working with large sub-packetization levels, which restricts their employment in practice. This paper presents constructions for MDS codes that simultaneously provide both small repair bandwidth and small sub-packetization level. In particular, this paper presents two general approaches to construct exact-repairable MDS codes that aim at significantly reducing the required sub-packetization level at the cost of slightly sub-optimal repair bandwidth. The first approach gives MDS codes that have repair bandwidth at most twice the optimal repair-bandwidth. Additionally, these codes also have the smallest possible sub-packetization level $\ell = O(r)$, where $r$ denotes the number of parity blocks. This approach is then generalized to design codes that have their repair bandwidth approaching the optimal repair-bandwidth at the cost of graceful increment in the required sub-packetization level. The second approach transforms an MDS code with optimal repair-bandwidth and large sub-packetization level into a longer MDS code with small sub-packetization level and near-optimal repair bandwidth. For a given $r$, the obtained codes have their sub-packetization level scaling logarithmically with the code length. In addition, the obtained codes require field size only linear in the code length and ensure load balancing among the intact code blocks in terms of the information downloaded from these blocks during the exact reconstruction of a code block.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2017

Optimal repair of Reed-Solomon codes: Achieving the cut-set bound

Coding for distributed storage gives rise to a new set of problems in coding theory related to the need of reducing inter-node communication in the system. A large number of recent papers addressed the problem of optimizing the total amount of information downloaded for repair of a single failed node (the repair bandwidth) by accessing information on $d$ {\em helper nodes}, where $k\le d\le n-1.$ By the so-called cut-set bound (Dimakis et al., 2010), the repair bandwidth of an $(n,k=n-r)$ MDS code using $d$ helper nodes is at least $dl/(d+1-k),$ where $l$ is the size of the node. Also, a number of known constructions of MDS array codes meet this bound with equality. In a related but separate line of work, Guruswami and Wootters (2016) studied repair of Reed-Solomon (RS) codes, showing that these codes can be repaired using a smaller bandwidth than under the trivial approach. At the same time, their work as well as follow-up papers stopped short of constructing RS codes (or any scalar MDS codes) that meet the cut-set bound with equality, which has been an open problem in coding theory. In this work we present a solution to this problem, constructing RS codes of length $n$ over the field $q^l, l=\exp((1+o(1))n\log n)$ that meet the cut-set bound. We also prove an almost matching lower bound on $l$, showing that the super-exponential scaling is both necessary and sufficient for achieving the cut-set bound using linear repair schemes. More precisely, we prove that for scalar MDS codes (including the RS codes) to meet this bound, the sub-packetization $l$ must satisfy $l \ge \exp((1+o(1)) k\log k).$

cs.IT↗

arXiv2017

Construction of Sidon spaces with applications to coding

A subspace of a finite extension field is called a Sidon space if the product of any two of its elements is unique up to a scalar multiplier from the base field. Sidon spaces were recently introduced by Bachoc et al. as a means to characterize multiplicative properties of subspaces, and yet no explicit constructions were given. In this paper, several constructions of Sidon spaces are provided. In particular, in some of the constructions the relation between $k$, the dimension of the Sidon space, and $n$, the dimension of the ambient extension field, is optimal. These constructions are shown to provide cyclic subspace codes, which are useful tools in network coding schemes. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this constitutes the first set of constructions of non-trivial cyclic subspace codes in which the relation between $k$ and $n$ is polynomial, and in particular, linear. As a result, a conjecture by Trautmann et al. regarding the existence of non-trivial cyclic subspace codes is resolved for most parameters, and multi-orbit cyclic subspace codes are attained, whose cardinality is within a constant factor (close to $1/2$) from the sphere-packing bound for subspace codes.

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arXiv2017

A Study on the Impact of Locality in the Decoding of Binary Cyclic Codes

In this paper, we study the impact of locality on the decoding of binary cyclic codes under two approaches, namely ordered statistics decoding (OSD) and trellis decoding. Given a binary cyclic code having locality or availability, we suitably modify the OSD to obtain gains in terms of the Signal-To-Noise ratio, for a given reliability and essentially the same level of decoder complexity. With regard to trellis decoding, we show that careful introduction of locality results in the creation of cyclic subcodes having lower maximum state complexity. We also present a simple upper-bounding technique on the state complexity profile, based on the zeros of the code. Finally, it is shown how the decoding speed can be significantly increased in the presence of locality, in the moderate-to-high SNR regime, by making use of a quick-look decoder that often returns the ML codeword.

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arXiv2016

Locally recoverable codes on algebraic curves

A code over a finite alphabet is called locally recoverable (LRC code) if every symbol in the encoding is a function of a small number (at most $r$) other symbols of the codeword. In this paper we introduce a construction of LRC codes on algebraic curves, extending a recent construction of Reed-Solomon like codes with locality. We treat the following situations: local recovery of a single erasure, local recovery of multiple erasures, and codes with several disjoint recovery sets for every coordinate (the {\em availability problem}). For each of these three problems we describe a general construction of codes on curves and construct several families of LRC codes. We also describe a construction of codes with availability that relies on automorphism groups of curves.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2016

Cyclic LRC Codes, binary LRC codes, and upper bounds on the distance of cyclic codes

We consider linear cyclic codes with the locality property, or locally recoverable codes (LRC codes). A family of LRC codes that generalize the classical construction of Reed-Solomon codes was constructed in a recent paper by I. Tamo and A. Barg (IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, no. 8, 2014). In this paper we focus on optimal cyclic codes that arise from this construction. We give a characterization of these codes in terms of their zeros, and observe that there are many equivalent ways of constructing optimal cyclic LRC codes over a given field. We also study subfield subcodes of cyclic LRC codes (BCH-like LRC codes) and establish several results about their locality and minimum distance. The locality parameter of a cyclic code is related to the dual distance of this code, and we phrase our results in terms of upper bounds on the dual distance.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2016

Bounds on the Parameters of Locally Recoverable Codes

A locally recoverable code (LRC code) is a code over a finite alphabet such that every symbol in the encoding is a function of a small number of other symbols that form a recovering set. In this paper we derive new finite-length and asymptotic bounds on the parameters of LRC codes. For LRC codes with a single recovering set for every coordinate, we derive an asymptotic Gilbert-Varshamov type bound for LRC codes and find the maximum attainable relative distance of asymptotically good LRC codes. Similar results are established for LRC codes with two disjoint recovering sets for every coordinate. For the case of multiple recovering sets we derive a lower bound on the parameters using expander graph arguments. Finally, we also derive finite-length upper bounds on the rate and distance of LRC codes with multiple recovering sets.

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