Bounds for List-Decoding and List-Recovery of Random Linear Codes

A family of error-correcting codes is list-decodable from error fraction $p$ if, for every code in the family, the number of codewords in any Hamming ball of fractional radius $p$ is less than some integer $L$ . It is said to be list-recoverable for input list size $\ell $ if for every sufficiently large subset of at least $L$ codewords, there is a coordinate where the codewords take more than $\ell $ values. In this work, we study the list size of random linear codes for both list-decoding and list-recovery as the rate approaches capacity. We show the following claims hold with high probability over the choice of the code (below $q$ is the alphabet size, and $ \varepsilon > 0$ is the gap to capacity). (1) A random linear code of rate $1 - \log _{q}(\ell) - \varepsilon $ requires list size $L \ge \ell ^{\Omega (1/ \varepsilon)}$ for list-recovery from input list size $\ell $ . (2) A random linear code of rate $1 - h_{q}(p) - \varepsilon $ requires list size $L \ge \left \lfloor{ {h_{q}(p)/ \varepsilon +0.99}}\right \rfloor $ for list-decoding from error fraction $p$ . (3) A random binary linear code of rate $1 - h_{2}(p) - \varepsilon $ is list-decodable from average error fraction $p$ with list size with $L \leq \left \lfloor{ {h_{2}(p)/ \varepsilon }}\right \rfloor + 2$ . Our lower bounds follow by exhibiting an explicit subset of codewords so that this subset—or some symbol-wise permutation of it—lies in a random linear code with high probability. Our upper bound follows by strengthening a result of (Li, Wootters, 2018).