This paper proposes a method to maximize the rate of reliable communication for polar codes operating on channels with memory. The channel is learned implicitly from data by optimizing a neural polar decoder (NPD). This approach enables simultaneous optimization of the code rate over the input distribution and the design of a practical coding scheme within the framework of polar codes. The proposed approach applies to scenarios where the channel model is unknown and treated as a black-box that produces output samples from input samples. We use NPDs to estimate the mutual information (MI) between the channel inputs and outputs, and optimize a parametric model of the input distribution. The methodology involves a two-phase process: a training phase and an inference phase. In the training phase, two steps are repeated iteratively. The first step optimizes the NPD to estimate the MI of the channel inputs and outputs. The second step improves the input distribution parameters by maximizing the MI estimate obtained with the NPD. In the inference phase, the optimized model is used to construct polar codes. This approach uses the Honda-Yamamoto (HY) scheme, which implements polar codes with optimized input distributions, together with list decoding. Experimental results on memoryless and finite state channels (FSCs) demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach, particularly in cases where the channel’s capacity-achieving input distribution is non-uniform. For these cases, significant improvements in MI and bit error rates (BERs) are shown over those achieved by uniform and independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) input distributions, validating our method for block lengths up to 1024. This data-driven approach can be utilized in real-world communication systems, bridging theoretical capacity estimation and practical coding performance.

In this paper, we adapt and analyze Neural Polar Decoders (NPDs) for end-to-end communication systems. While prior work demonstrated the effectiveness of NPDs on synthetic channels, this study extends the NPD to real-world communication systems. The NPD was adapted to complete OFDM and single-carrier communication systems. To satisfy practical system requirements, the NPD is extended to support any code length via rate matching, higher-order modulations, and robustness across diverse channel conditions. The NPD operates directly on channels with memory, exploiting their structure to achieve higher data rates without requiring pilots and a cyclic prefix. Although NPD entails higher computational complexity than the standard 5G polar decoder, its neural network architecture enables an efficient representation of channel statistics, resulting in manageable complexity suitable for practical systems. Experimental results over 5G channels demonstrate that the NPD consistently outperforms the 5G polar decoder in terms of BER, BLER, and throughput. These improvements are particularly significant for low-rate and short-block configurations, which are prevalent in 5G control channels. Furthermore, NPDs applied to single-carrier systems offer performance comparable to OFDM with lower PAPR, enabling effective single-carrier transmission over 5G channels. These results position the NPD as a high-performance, pilotless, and robust decoding solution.

This paper introduces a neural polar decoder (NPD) for deletion channels with a constant deletion rate. Existing polar decoders for deletion channels exhibit high computational complexity of$O\left(N^{4} \log N\right)$, where$N$is the block length. This limits the application of polar codes for deletion channels to short-to-moderate block lengths. In this work, we demonstrate that employing NPDs for deletion channels can reduce the computational complexity. First, we extend the architecture of the NPD to support deletion channels. Specifically, the NPD architecture consists of four neural networks (NNs), each replicating fundamental successive cancellation (SC) decoder operations. To support deletion channels, we change the architecture of only one. The computational complexity of the NPD is$O(A N \log N)$, where the parameter$A$represents a computational budget determined by the user and is independent of the channel. We evaluate the new extended NPD for deletion channels with deletion rates$\delta \in\{0.01,0.1\}$and we verify the NPD with the ground truth given by the trellis decoder by Tal et al. We further show that due to the reduced complexity of the NPD, we are able to incorporate list decoding and further improve performance. We believe that the extended NPD presented here could have applications in future technologies like DNA storage.

In this work, we explore the enhancement of polar codes for channels with memory, focusing on achieving low decoding complexity and optimizing input distributions for maximum transmission rates. Polar codes are known for their efficient decoding, exhibiting a complexity of O($N$log$N$) in memoryless channels, and complexity of O(| S |3N log$N$) in finite state channels (FSCs), where|$S$| is the state space size. A notable recent advancement is the integration of neural networks (NNs) to create an neural polar decoder (NPD), which is adept at learning from data without the knowledge of the channel model, effectively bypassing the cubic complexity growth associated with the channel state size. In this paper, we propose a framework to optimize the input distribution for polar codes, aiming to maximize the mutual information of effective bit channels. This framework has been tested on both memoryless and FSCs, including the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel and the Ising channel, yielding promising results. The key contribution of this paper is the demonstration of the feasibility of simultaneously selecting an optimal input distribution and creating a practical decoder for various channel types, even in the absence of a channel model. This approach paves the way for new advancements in data-driven communication theory, especially for channels with memory.

This paper presents a data-driven methodology for estimating capacity regions in multi-user communication scenarios, focusing on channels with discrete alphabets, both with and without feedback. Prior research has successfully utilized neural networks for estimating capacity regions in continuous domains. However, the shift to discrete alphabets introduces a significant challenge due to the lack of end-to-end differentiability of the joint model. To tackle this issue, we first formulate the optimization problem of the causally conditioned directed information rate as a decentralized Markov decision process (MDP). Building on this formulation, we introduce a tractable optimization procedure specifically designed to estimate rate pairs that lie on the boundary of the capacity region. In addressing the inherent complexity of the MDP state space, we employ a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm to learn optimal policies. We demonstrate the performance of our methodology by applying it to various communication scenarios, including the two-way channel and the multiple access channel (MAC). The results showcase the adaptability and performance of the proposed RL-based framework in estimating capacity regions without explicit knowledge of the underlying channel model, whether there is feedback or not.

In this work, a novel data-driven methodology for designing neural polar decoders for channels with and without memory is proposed. The methodology is suitable for the case where the channel is given as a “black-box” and the designer has access to the channel for generating observations of its inputs and outputs, but does not have access to the explicit channel model. The proposed method leverages the structure of the successive cancellation (SC) decoder to devise a neural SC (NSC) decoder. The NSC decoder uses neural networks (NNs) to replace the core elements of the original SC decoder, the check-node, the bit-node and the soft-decision. Along with the NSC, we devise additional NN that embeds the channel outputs into the input space of the SC decoder. The proposed method is supported by theoretical guarantees that include the consistency of the NSC. Additionally, the computational complexity of the NSC decoder does not increase with the channel’s memory size and is given by$O(mdN\log N)$, where N is the block length, and d and m represent the dimensions of the input and the hidden units of the implemented NNs, respectively. This sets its main advantage over successive cancellation trellis (SCT) decoder for finite state channels (FSCs) that has complexity of$O(|{\mathcal {S}}|^{3} N\log N)$, where$|{\mathcal {S}}|$denotes the number of channel states. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithms on memoryless channels and on channels with memory. The empirical results are compared with the analytic polar decoder, given by the SC and SCT decoders. We further show that our algorithms are applicable for the case where there SC and SCT decoders are not applicable.

Directed information (DI) is a fundamental measure for the study and analysis of sequential stochastic models. In particular, when optimized over input distributions it characterizes the capacity of general communication channels. However, analytic computation of DI is typically intractable and existing optimization techniques over discrete input alphabets require knowledge of the channel model, which renders them inapplicable when only samples are available. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel optimization framework for estimated DI over discrete spaces. We formulate DI optimization as a Markov decision process and leverage reinforcement learning techniques to optimize a deep generative model of the input process probability mass function (PMF). Combining this optimizer with the recently developed DI neural estimator, we obtain an alternating optimization algorithm which is applied to estimating the (feedforward and feedback) capacity of various discrete channels with memory. Furthermore, we demonstrate how to use the optimized PMF model to (i) obtain theoretical bounds on the feedback capacity of unifilar finite-state channels; and (ii) perform probabilistic shaping of constellations in the peak power-constrained additive white Gaussian noise channel.

In this work, a novel data-driven methodology for designing polar codes is proposed. The methodology is suitable for the case where the channel is given as a "black-box" and the designer has access to the channel for generating observations of its inputs and outputs, but does not have access to the explicit channel model. The methodology consists of two components: (1) a neural estimation of the sufficient statistic of the channel outputs using recent advances in Kullback Leibler (KL) estimation, and (2) a neural successive cancellation (NSC) decoder using three neural networks that replace the core elements of the successive cancellation (SC) decoder. The parameters of the neural networks are determined during a training phase where the mutual information of the effective channels is estimated. We demonstrate the performance of the algorithm on memoryless channels and on finite state channels. Then, we compare the results with the optimal decoding given by the SC and SC trellis decoders, respectively.

In this paper, we introduce a data-driven methodology for estimating capacity regions of continuous channels in multi-user communication systems. Computing capacity regions is a long standing open problem, even in simple communication scenarios. Nevertheless, it is often possible to represent their capacity regions as the limit of an optimization problem (a multi-letter expression). In many cases, these multi-letter expressions can be expressed in terms of directed information (DI) rates. Accordingly, our approach utilizes neural networks to estimate capacity regions, leveraging the recent introduction of the directed information neural estimator (DINE). The main idea of our methodology involves training DINE-based models using samples of channel inputs and outputs, and using these models to estimate the DI rate terms that are intrinsic to the studied capacity region. To estimate the capacity region rates, we optimize the DI rates over the involved input distributions which are parameterized by a neural distribution transformer (NDT), and execute an alternating maximization procedure between the NDT models and DINE-based models until convergence is achieved. The methodology is suitable for the case where the channel is treated as a "black-box" and the designer can only gather observations of its inputs and outputs, lacking any knowledge of the explicit channel model. The performance of our proposed algorithm is shown via several well-known settings, including the Gaussian two-way channel and the two-user Gaussian multiple-access channel with and without feedback.

This work develops a new method for estimating and optimizing the directed information rate between two jointly stationary and ergodic stochastic processes. Building upon recent advances in machine learning, we propose a recurrent neural network (RNN)-based estimator which is optimized via gradient ascent over the RNN parameters. The estimator does not require prior knowledge of the underlying joint/marginal distributions and can be easily optimized over continuous input processes realized by a deep generative model. We prove consistency of the proposed estimation and optimization methods and combine them to obtain end-to-end performance guarantees. Applications for channel capacity estimation of continuous channels with memory are explored, and empirical results demonstrating the scalability and accuracy of our method are provided. When the channel is memoryless, we investigate the mapping learned by the optimized input generator.

Density estimation plays an important role in modeling random variables (RVs) with continuous alphabets. This work provides an algorithm that estimates the probability density function (PDF) of stationary and ergodic random processes using recurrent neural networks (RNNs). The main idea is to decompose the target PDF into a known auxiliary PDF and a likelihood ratio between the target and auxiliary PDFs. The algorithm focuses on estimating the likelihood ratio using the Donsker Vardhan (DV) variational formula of Kullback Leibler (KL) divergence. Together, the maximizer of the DV formula and the auxiliary PDF are used to construct the estimator of the target PDF in the form of a Gibbs density. The obtained estimator converges to the target PDF in total variation (TV) and in distribution. Also, we show that proposed estimator minimizes the cross entropy (CE) between the target and auxiliary distribution, and that with a proper choice of the auxiliary distribution, it defines a tight upper bound on the entropy rate. We demonstrate this approach by estimating the density of a Gaussian hidden Markov model.

Directed information (DI) is a fundamental measure for the study and analysis of sequential stochastic models. In particular, when optimized over the input distribution, it characterizes the capacity of general communication channels. However, existing optimization methods for discrete input alphabets assume full knowledge of the channel model, and are therefore not applicable when only samples are available. We derive a new method that overcomes this limitation and enables optimizing DI over unknown channels. To that end, we formulate the problem as a Markov decision process and leverage reinforcement learning techniques to optimize a deep generative model of the channel input probability mass function (PMF). Combining our optimizer with the DI neural estimator, we obtain an end-to-end estimation-optimization scheme which is applied for estimating the capacity of various discrete channels with memory. We provide empirical results that demonstrate the utility of the proposed framework and further show how to use the optimized PMF generator to obtain theoretical bounds on the feedback capacity for unifilar finite state channels.

We propose a new method to compute the feedback capacity of unifilar finite state channels (FSCs) with memory using reinforcement learning (RL). The feedback capacity was previously estimated using its formulation as a Markov decision process (MDP) with dynamic programming (DP) algorithms. However, their computational complexity grows exponentially with the channel alphabet size. Therefore, we use RL, and specifically, its ability to parameterize value functions and policies with neural networks, to evaluate numerically the feedback capacity of channels with a large alphabet size. The outcome of the RL algorithm is a numerical lower bound on the feedback capacity, which is used to reveal the structure of the optimal solution. The structure is modeled by a graph-based auxiliary random variable that is utilized to derive an analytic upper bound on the feedback capacity with the duality bound. The capacity computation is concluded by verifying the tightness of the upper bound by testing whether it is Bahl-Cocke-Jelinek-Raviv (BCJR) invariant. We demonstrate this method on the Ising channel with an arbitrary alphabet size. For an alphabet size smaller than or equal to 8, we derive the analytic solution of the capacity. Next, the structure of the numerical solution is used to deduce a simple coding scheme that achieves the feedback capacity and serves as a lower bound for larger alphabets. For an alphabet size greater than 8, we present an upper bound on the feedback capacity. For an asymptotically large alphabet size, we present an asymptotic optimal coding scheme.

Calculating the capacity (with or without feedback) of channels with memory and continuous alphabets is a challenging task. It requires optimizing the directed information (DI) rate over all channel input distributions. The objective is a multi-letter expression, whose analytic solution is only known for a few specific cases. When no analytic solution is present or the channel model is unknown, there is no unified framework for calculating or even approximating capacity. This work proposes a novel capacity estimation algorithm that treats the channel as a `black-box', both when feedback is or is not present. The algorithm has two main ingredients: (i) a neural distribution transformer (NDT) model that shapes a noise variable into the channel input distribution, which we are able to sample, and (ii) the DI neural estimator (DINE) that estimates the communication rate of the current NDT model. These models are trained by an alternating maximization procedure to both estimate the channel capacity and obtain an NDT for the optimal input distribution. The method is demonstrated on the moving average additive Gaussian noise channel, where it is shown that both the capacity and feedback capacity are estimated without knowledge of the channel transition kernel. The proposed estimation framework opens the door to a myriad of capacity approximation results for continuous alphabet channels that were inaccessible until now.

In this paper, we propose a novel method to compute the feedback capacity of channels with memory using reinforcement learning (RL). In RL, one seeks to maximize cumulative rewards collected in a sequential decision-making environment. This is done by collecting samples of the underlying environment and using them to learn the optimal decision rule. The main advantage of this approach is its computational efficiency, even in high dimensional problems. Hence, RL can be used to estimate numerically the feedback capacity of unifilar finite state channels (FSCs) with large alphabet size. The outcome of the RL algorithm sheds light on the properties of the optimal decision rule, which in our case, is the optimal input distribution of the channel. These insights can be converted into analytic, single-letter capacity expressions by solving corresponding lower and upper bounds. We demonstrate the efficiency of this method by analytically solving the feedback capacity of the well-known Ising channel with a ternary alphabet. We also provide a simple coding scheme that achieves the feedback capacity.