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Lukas Rapp

Publications and source records attributed to Lukas Rapp.

15 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

Sensing-Aided Ordered Reliability Bits Guessing Random Additive Noise Decoding

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) is a key enabler for future wireless systems, providing environmental information that can support tasks beyond conventional data transmission. However, its impact on channel decoding remains less explored. This paper studies sensing-aided ordered reliability bits guessing random additive noise decoding (ORBGRAND) over single-input single-output narrowband fading channels. Environmental information is used to construct a geometry-based prior for the channel coefficient, which is fused with pilot observations via linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE) estimation. The resulting posterior channel estimate and uncertainty are used to compute the log-likelihood ratios (LLRs) supplied to ORBGRAND, improving the reliability ordering that drives its noise-guessing process. Simulation results demonstrate improved block error rate and reduced average query complexity, with the largest gains in pilot-limited regimes.

eess.SP↗
arXiv2026

Generalized Segmented GRAND for Guesswork Reduction in Turbo Product Decoding

Guessing random additive noise decoding (GRAND) can efficiently decode any moderately redundant code with near maximum likelihood (ML) performance via noise effect guessing. For binary linear codes, Rowshan and Yuan's Segmented GRAND was the first to show that constrained guessing can reduce guesswork. Although powerful, their approach requires a specific parity-check matrix structure that limits the number of constraints that can be exploited as well as the class of applicable codes. Here we introduce GSegGRAND, a generalization of Segmented GRAND that circumvents its limitations. Built on a novel parity check structure and a transformation that maps codes into this structure, GSegGRAND efficiently incorporates up to log2(n) constraints for a wide range of codes, reducing guesswork by an additional 75% over Segmented GRAND. To leverage that advantage for soft-output decoding, we derive an accurate soft-output (SO) equation for GSegGRAND by extending soft-output GRAND (SOGRAND) to incorporate constrained guessing. Applying this SO to turbo product decoding, GSegGRAND achieves up to 88% guesswork reduction, making it a promising candidate for low-latency decoding in future communication systems.

cs.IT↗
arXiv2026

SOGRAND decoding of LDPC codes

Long forward error correction codes are typically constructed by concatenating shorter component codes that are then decoded through iterative Soft-Input Soft-Output (SISO) of their components. The recently introduced Soft Output Guessing Random Additive Noise Decoding (SOGRAND) has been shown to enable accurate SISO component decoding for a broad range of component codes. Here we establish that by specializing its SISO computation to Single Parity Check codes, SOGRAND offers an alternative existing Check Node (CN) update for decoding Low Density Parity Check codes. Simulation results demonstrate similar or better decoding performance than Gallager's sum-product algorithm and norm-min-sum, while offering two distinct low complexity, hardware friendly CN update algorithms.

cs.IT↗
arXiv2026

Efficient Soft-Output Guessing for Enhanced Quantum Tanner Code Decoding

We introduce a generalized low-density parity-check decoding framework for quantum Tanner codes utilizing soft-output guessing random additive noise decoding (SOGRAND). By soft-output decoding entire component codes rather than individual parity checks, we mitigate the effects of trapping sets and cycles, resulting in improved convergence. Because our decoder preserves the message passing structure of standard belief propagation (BP), it is compatible with many BP enhancements. We demonstrate this with OSD postprocessing, quaternary BP, and RelayBP, each yielding further gains. Standalone SOGRAND outperforms the standard BP+OSD baseline by over two orders of magnitude in logical error rate. In combination with the Relay principle, SOGRAND outperforms RelayBP by over one order of magnitude, providing a way forward for scalable decoding of the emerging class of Tanner-code-based quantum codes.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2025

Group Probability Decoding of Turbo Product Codes over Higher-Order Fields

Binary turbo product codes (TPCs) are powerful error-correcting codes constructed from short component codes. Traditionally, turbo product decoding passes log likelihood ratios (LLRs) between the component decoders, inherently losing information when bit correlation exists. Such correlation can arise exogenously from sources like intersymbol interference and endogenously during component code decoding. To preserve these correlations and improve performance, we propose turbo product decoding based on group probabilities. We theoretically predict mutual information and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) gains of group over bit-probability decoding. To translate these theoretical insights to practice, we revisit non-binary TPCs that naturally support group-probability decoding. We show that any component list decoder that takes group probabilities as input and outputs block-wise soft-output can partially preserve bit correlation, which we demonstrate with symbol-level ORBGRAND combined with soft-output GRAND (SOGRAND). Our results demonstrate that group-probability-based turbo product decoding achieves SNR gains of up to 0.3 dB for endogenous correlation and 0.7 dB for exogenous correlation, compared to bit-probability decoding.

cs.IT↗
arXiv2025

SOGRAND Assisted Guesswork Reduction

Proposals have been made to reduce the guesswork of Guessing Random Additive Noise Decoding (GRAND) for binary linear codes by leveraging codebook structure at the expense of degraded block error rate (BLER). We establish one can preserve guesswork reduction while eliminating BLER degradation through dynamic list decoding terminated based on Soft Output GRAND's error probability estimate. We illustrate the approach with a method inspired by published literature and compare performance with Guessing Codeword Decoding (GCD). We establish that it is possible to provide the same BLER performance as GCD while reducing guesswork by up to a factor of 32.

cs.IT↗
arXiv2025

A Balanced Tree Transformation to Reduce GRAND Queries

Guessing Random Additive Noise Decoding (GRAND) and its variants, known for their near-maximum likelihood performance, have been introduced in recent years. One such variant, Segmented GRAND, reduces decoding complexity by generating only noise patterns that meet specific constraints imposed by the linear code. In this paper, we introduce a new method to efficiently derive multiple constraints from the parity check matrix. By applying a random invertible linear transformation and reorganizing the matrix into a tree structure, we extract up to log2(n) constraints, reducing the number of decoding queries while maintaining the structure of the original code for a code length of n. We validate the method through theoretical analysis and experimental simulations.

cs.IT↗
arXiv2024

Optimized Soft-Aided Decoding of OFEC and Staircase Codes

We propose a novel soft-aided hard-decision decoding algorithm for general product-like codes. It achieves error correcting performance similar to that of a soft-decision turbo decoder for staircase and OFEC codes, while maintaining a low complexity.

cs.IT↗
arXiv2024

Performance Analysis of Generalized Product Codes with Irregular Degree Distribution

This paper investigates the theoretical analysis of intrinsic message passing decoding for generalized product codes (GPCs) with irregular degree distributions, a generalization of product codes that allows every code bit to be protected by a minimum of two and potentially more component codes. We derive a random hypergraph-based asymptotic performance analysis for GPCs, extending previous work that considered the case where every bit is protected by exactly two component codes. The analysis offers a new tool to guide the code design of GPCs by providing insights into the influence of degree distributions on the performance of GPCs.

cs.IT↗
arXiv2022

Structural Optimization of Factor Graphs for Symbol Detection via Continuous Clustering and Machine Learning

We propose a novel method to optimize the structure of factor graphs for graph-based inference. As an example inference task, we consider symbol detection on linear inter-symbol interference channels. The factor graph framework has the potential to yield low-complexity symbol detectors. However, the sum-product algorithm on cyclic factor graphs is suboptimal and its performance is highly sensitive to the underlying graph. Therefore, we optimize the structure of the underlying factor graphs in an end-to-end manner using machine learning. For that purpose, we transform the structural optimization into a clustering problem of low-degree factor nodes that incorporates the known channel model into the optimization. Furthermore, we study the combination of this approach with neural belief propagation, yielding near-maximum a posteriori symbol detection performance for specific channels.

cs.IT↗
arXiv2022

Improved Soft-aided Decoding of Product Codes with Dynamic Reliability Scores

Products codes (PCs) are conventionally decoded with efficient iterative bounded-distance decoding (iBDD) based on hard-decision channel outputs which entails a performance loss compared to a soft-decision decoder. Recently, several hybrid algorithms have been proposed aimed to improve the performance of iBDD decoders via the aid of a certain amount of soft information while keeping the decoding complexity similarly low as in iBDD. We propose a novel hybrid low-complexity decoder for PCs based on error-and-erasure (EaE) decoding and dynamic reliability scores (DRSs). This decoder is based on a novel EaE component code decoder, which is able to decode beyond the designed distance of the component code but suffers from an increased miscorrection probability. The DRSs, reflecting the reliability of a codeword bit, are used to detect and avoid miscorrections. Simulation results show that this policy can reduce the miscorrection rate significantly and improves the decoding performance. The decoder requires only ternary message passing and a slight increase of computational complexity compared to iBDD, which makes it suitable for high-speed communication systems. Coding gains of up to 1.2 dB compared to the conventional iBDD decoder are observed.

cs.IT↗
arXiv2022

Error-and-erasure Decoding of Product and Staircase Codes with Simplified Extrinsic Message Passing

The decoding performance of product codes and staircase codes based on iterative bounded-distance decoding (iBDD) can be improved with the aid of a moderate amount of soft information, maintaining a low decoding complexity. One promising approach is error-and-erasure (EaE) decoding, whose performance can be reliably estimated with density evolution (DE). However, the extrinsic message passing (EMP) decoder required by the DE analysis entails a much higher complexity than the simple intrinsic message passing (IMP) decoder. In this paper, we simplify the EMP decoding algorithm for the EaE channel for two commonly-used EaE decoders by deriving the EMP decoding results from the IMP decoder output and some additional logical operations based on the algebraic structure of the component codes and the EaE decoding rule. Simulation results show that the number of BDD steps is reduced to being comparable with IMP. Furthermore, we propose a heuristic modification of the EMP decoder that reduces the complexity further. In numerical simulations, the decoding performance of the modified decoder yields up to 0.2 dB improvement compared to standard EMP decoding.

cs.IT↗
arXiv2022

Error-and-Erasure Decoding of Product and Staircase Codes

High-rate product codes (PCs) and staircase codes (SCs) are ubiquitous codes in high-speed optical communication achieving near-capacity performance on the binary symmetric channel. Their success is mostly due to very efficient iterative decoding algorithms that require very little complexity. In this paper, we extend the density evolution (DE) analysis for PCs and SCs to a channel with ternary output and ternary message passing, where the third symbol marks an erasure. We investigate the performance of a standard error-and-erasure decoder and of its simplification using DE. The proposed analysis can be used to find component code configurations and quantizer levels for the channel output. We also show how the use of even-weight BCH subcodes as component codes can improve the decoding performance at high rates. The DE results are verified by Monte-Carlo simulations, which show that additional coding gains of up to 0.6 dB are possible by ternary decoding, at only a small additional increase in complexity compared to traditional binary message passing.

cs.IT↗