A locally decodable code (LDC) C: 0,1 ^k -> 0,1 ^n is an error correcting code wherein individual bits of the message can be recovered by only querying a few bits of a noisy codeword. LDCs found a myriad of applications both in theory and in practice, ranging from probabilistically checkable proofs to distributed storage. However, despite nearly two decades of extensive study, the best known constructions of O(1)-query LDCs have super-polynomial blocklength. The notion of relaxed LDCs is a natural relaxation of LDCs, which aims to bypass the foregoing barrier by requiring local decoding of nearly all individual message bits, yet allowing decoding failure (but not error) on the rest. State of the art constructions of O(1)-query relaxed LDCs achieve blocklength n = O(k^ 1+ ) for an arbitrarily small constant . We prove a lower bound which shows that O(1)-query relaxed LDCs cannot achieve blocklength n = k^ 1+ o(1) . This resolves an open problem raised by Goldreich in 2004.
There is an extensive literature that is concerned with lower bounds on (non-relaxed) locally decodable codes in various regimes (see, e.g., @cite_7 @cite_9 @cite_10 @cite_11 @cite_27 @cite_32 @cite_26 ), as well as for the closely related notion of locally correctable codes (see, e.g., @cite_6 @cite_20 @cite_5 @cite_3 ), in which the goal is to correct a bit of the codeword rather than a bit of the message. We stress that none of the aforementioned bounds apply for (see discussion in sec:challange ).
@cite_26 @cite_7 @cite_9 @cite_32 @cite_6 @cite_3 @cite_27 @cite_5 @cite_10 @cite_20 @cite_11
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A locally decodable code (LDC) encodes n-bit strings x in m-bit codewords C(x) in such a way that one can recover any bit xi from a corrupted codeword by querying only a few bits of that word. We use a quantum argument to prove that LDCs with 2 classical queries require exponential length: m = 2Ω(n). Previously, this was known only for linear codes (, in: Proceedings of 17th IEEE Conference on Computation Complexity, 2002, pp. 175-183). The proof proceeds by showing that a 2-query LDC can be decoded with a single quantum query, when defined in an appropriate sense. It goes on to establish an exponential lower bound on any 'l-query locally quantum-decodable code'. We extend our lower bounds to non-binary alphabets and also somewhat improve the polynomial lower bounds by Katz and Trevisan for LDCs with more than 2 queries. Furthermore, we show that q quantum queries allow more succinct LDCs than the best known LDCs with q classical queries. Finally, we give new classical lower bounds and quantum upper bounds for the setting of private information retrieval. In particular, we exhibit a quantum 2-server private information retrieval (PIR) scheme with O(n3 10) qubits of communication, beating the O(n1 3) bits of communication of the best known classical 2-server PIR. In this paper, we study codes with locality that can recover from two erasures via a sequence of two local, parity-check computations. By a local parity-check computation, we mean recovery via a single parity-check equation associated with small Hamming weight. Earlier approaches considered recovery in parallel; the sequential approach allows us to potentially construct codes with improved minimum distance. These codes, which we refer to as locally 2-reconstructible codes, are a natural generalization along one direction, of codes with all-symbol locality introduced by , in which recovery from a single erasure is considered. By studying the generalized Hamming weights of the dual code, we derive upper bounds on the minimum distance of locally 2-reconstructible codes and provide constructions for a family of codes based on Turan graphs, that are optimal with respect to this bound. The minimum distance bound derived here is universal in the sense that no code which permits all-symbol local recovery from 2 erasures can have larger minimum distance regardless of approach adopted. Our approach also leads to a new bound on the minimum distance of codes with all-symbol locality for the single-erasure case. We consider coding schemes for computationally bounded channels, which can introduce an arbitrary set of errors as long as (a) the fraction of errors is bounded with high probability by a parameter p and (b) the process that adds the errors can be described by a sufficiently “simple” circuit. Codes for such channel models are attractive since, like codes for standard adversarial errors, they can handle channels whose true behavior is unknown or varying over time. For two classes of channels, we provide explicit, efficiently encodable decodable codes of optimal rate where only inefficiently decodable codes were previously known. In each case, we provide one encoder decoder that works for every channel in the class. The encoders are randomized, and probabilities are taken over the (local, unknown to the decoder) coins of the encoder and those of the channel. Unique decoding for additive errors: We give the first construction of a polynomial-time encodable decodable code for additive (a.k.a. oblivious) channels that achieve the Shannon capacity 1 − H(p). These are channels that add an arbitrary error vector e ∈ 0, 1 N of weight at most pN to the transmitted word; the vector e can depend on the code but not on the randomness of the encoder or the particular transmitted word. Such channels capture binary symmetric errors and burst errors as special cases. List decoding for polynomial-time channels: For every constant c > 0, we construct codes with optimal rate (arbitrarily close to 1 − H(p)) that efficiently recover a short list containing the correct message with high probability for channels describable by circuits of size at most Nc. Our construction is not fully explicit but rather Monte Carlo (we give an algorithm that, with high probability, produces an encoder decoder pair that works for all time Nc channels). We are not aware of any channel models considered in the information theory literature other than purely adversarial channels, which require more than linear-size circuits to implement. We justify the relaxation to list decoding with an impossibility result showing that, in a large range of parameters (p > 1 4), codes that are uniquely decodable for a modest class of channels (online, memoryless, nonuniform channels) cannot have positive rate. This paper presents essentially optimal lower bounds on the size of linear codes C : 0, 1 n ? 0, 1 m which have the property that, for constants ?, ? > 0, any bit of the message can be recovered with probability 1 2 + ? by an algorithm reading only 2 bits of a codeword corrupted in up to ?m positions. Such codes are known to be applicable to, among other things, the construction and analysis of information-theoretically secure private information retrieval schemes. In this work, we show that m must be at least 2?(? 1-2? n). Our results extend work by Goldreich, Karloff, Schulman, and Trevisan [GKST02], which is based heavily on methods developed by Katz and Trevisan [KT00]. The key to our improved bounds is an analysis which bypasses an intermediate reduction used in both prior works. The resulting improvement in the efficiency of the overall analysis is sufficient to achieve a lower bound optimal within a constant factor in the exponent. A construction of a locally decodable linear code matching this bound is presented.