We consider the problem of decoding corrupted error correcting codes with NC⁰[⊕] circuits in the classical and quantum settings. We show that any such classical circuit can correctly recover only a vanishingly small fraction of messages, if the codewords are sent over a noisy channel with positive error rate. Previously this was known only for linear codes with large dual distance, whereas our result applies to any code. By contrast, we give a simple quantum circuit that correctly decodes the Hadamard code with probability Ω(ε²) even if a (1/2 - ε)-fraction of a codeword is adversarially corrupted. Our classical hardness result is based on an equidistribution phenomenon for multivariate polynomials over a finite field under biased input-distributions. This is proved using a structure-versus-randomness strategy based on a new notion of rank for high-dimensional polynomial maps that may be of independent interest. Our quantum circuit is inspired by a non-local version of the Bernstein-Vazirani problem, a technique to generate "poor man’s cat states" by Watts et al., and a constant-depth quantum circuit for the OR function by Takahashi and Tani.
@InProceedings{briet_et_al:LIPIcs.ITCS.2024.21, author = {Bri\"{e}t, Jop and Buhrman, Harry and Castro-Silva, Davi and Neumann, Niels M. P.}, title = {{Noisy Decoding by Shallow Circuits with Parities: Classical and Quantum (Extended Abstract)}}, booktitle = {15th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2024)}, pages = {21:1--21:11}, series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)}, ISBN = {978-3-95977-309-6}, ISSN = {1868-8969}, year = {2024}, volume = {287}, editor = {Guruswami, Venkatesan}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ITCS.2024.21}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-195490}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ITCS.2024.21}, annote = {Keywords: Coding theory, circuit complexity, quantum complexity theory, higher-order Fourier analysis, non-local games} }
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