Improved list-decodability of random linear binary codes

Abstract: There has been a great deal of work establishing that random linear codes are as list-decodable as uniformly random codes, in the sense that a random linear binary code of rate $1 - H(p) - \epsilon$ is $(p,O(1/\epsilon))$-list-decodable with high probability. In this work, we show that such codes are $(p, H(p)/\epsilon + 2)$-list-decodable with high probability, for any $p \in (0, 1/2)$ and $\epsilon > 0$. In addition to improving the constant in known list-size bounds, our argument, which is quite simple, works simultaneously for all values of $p$, while previous works obtaining $L = O(1/\epsilon)$ patched together different arguments to cover different parameter regimes. Our approach is to strengthen an existential argument of (Guruswami, H{\aa}stad, Sudan and Zuckerman, IEEE Trans. IT, 2002) to hold with high probability. To complement our upper bound for random linear codes, we also improve an argument of (Guruswami, Narayanan, IEEE Trans. IT, 2014) to obtain an essentially tight lower bound of $1/\epsilon$ on the list size of uniformly random codes; this implies that random linear codes are in fact more list-decodable than uniformly random codes, in the sense that the list sizes are strictly smaller. To demonstrate the applicability of these techniques, we use them to (a) obtain more information about the distribution of list sizes of random linear codes and (b) to prove a similar result for random linear rank-metric codes.