Turbo Autoencoder with a Trainable Interleaver

Abstract: A critical aspect of reliable communication involves the design of codes that allow transmissions to be robustly and computationally efficiently decoded under noisy conditions. Advances in the design of reliable codes have been driven by coding theory and have been sporadic. Recently, it is shown that channel codes that are comparable to modern codes can be learned solely via deep learning. In particular, Turbo Autoencoder (TURBOAE), introduced by Jiang et al., is shown to achieve the reliability of Turbo codes for Additive White Gaussian Noise channels. In this paper, we focus on applying the idea of TURBOAE to various practical channels, such as fading channels and chirp noise channels. We introduce TURBOAE-TI, a novel neural architecture that combines TURBOAE with a trainable interleaver design. We develop a carefully-designed training procedure and a novel interleaver penalty function that are crucial in learning the interleaver and TURBOAE jointly. We demonstrate that TURBOAE-TI outperforms TURBOAE and LTE Turbo codes for several channels of interest. We also provide interpretation analysis to better understand TURBOAE-TI.