Decoding Short LDPC Codes via BP-RNN Diversity and Reliability-Based Post-Processing

Abstract: This paper investigates decoder diversity architectures for short low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes, based on recurrent neural network (RNN) models of the belief-propagation (BP) algorithm. We propose a new approach to achieve decoder diversity in the waterfall region, by specializing BP-RNN decoders to specific classes of errors, with absorbing set support. We further combine our approach with an ordered statistics decoding (OSD) post-processing step, which effectively leverages the bit-error rate optimization deriving from the use of the binary cross-entropy loss function. We show that a single specialized BP-RNN decoder combines better than BP with the OSD post-processing step. Moreover, combining OSD post-processing with the diversity brought by the use of multiple BP-RNN decoders, provides an efficient way to bridge the gap to maximum likelihood decoding.