English

Leveraging Code Automorphisms for Improved Syndrome-Based Neural Decoding

Information Theory 2026-05-06 v1 Machine Learning math.IT

Abstract

Syndrome-based neural decoding (SBND) has emerged as a promising deep learning approach for soft-decision decoding of high-rate, short-length codes. However, this approach still has substantial room for improvement. In this paper, we show how to leverage code automorphisms to enhance the ability of existing SBND models to learn and generalize through data augmentation during training and inference. As a result, for the short high-rate codes considered, we obtain models that closely approach MLD performance using small datasets and proper training. Our findings also suggest that many prior results for SBND models in the literature underestimate their true correction capability due to undertraining. Code to reproduce all results is available at: https://github.com/lebidan/sbnd.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.03620,
  title  = {Leveraging Code Automorphisms for Improved Syndrome-Based Neural Decoding},
  author = {Raphaël Le Bidan and Ahmad Ismail and Elsa Dupraz and Charbel Abdel Nour},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.03620},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

6 pages, 7 figures, submitted to IEEE for possible publication. Code to reproduce all results is available at: https://github.com/lebidan/sbnd

R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:50:37.936Z