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Structure Theorems (and Fast Algorithms) for List Recovery of Subspace-Design Codes

Information Theory 2025-12-10 v1 Computational Complexity math.IT

Abstract

List recovery of error-correcting codes has emerged as a fundamental notion with broad applications across coding theory and theoretical computer science. Folded Reed-Solomon (FRS) and univariate multiplicity codes are explicit constructions which can be efficiently list-recovered up to capacity, namely a fraction of errors approaching 1R1-R where RR is the code rate. Chen and Zhang and related works showed that folded Reed-Solomon codes and linear codes must have list sizes exponential in 1/ϵ1/\epsilon for list-recovering from an error-fraction 1Rϵ1-R-\epsilon. These results suggest that one cannot list-recover FRS codes in time that is also polynomial in 1/ϵ1/\epsilon. In contrast to such limitations, we show, extending algorithmic advances of Ashvinkumar, Habib, and Srivastava for list decoding, that even if the lists in the case of list-recovery are large, they are highly structured. In particular, we can output a compact description of a set of size only O((log)/ϵ)\ell^{O((\log \ell)/\epsilon)} which contains the relevant list, while running in time only polynomial in 1/ϵ1/\epsilon (the previously known compact description due to Guruswami and Wang had size n/ϵ\approx n^{\ell/\epsilon}). We also improve on the state-of-the-art algorithmic results for the task of list-recovery.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.08017,
  title  = {Structure Theorems (and Fast Algorithms) for List Recovery of Subspace-Design Codes},
  author = {Rohan Goyal and Venkatesan Guruswami},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.08017},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:15:42.409Z