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Efficiently decoding Reed-Muller codes from random errors

Reed-Muller codes encode an $m$-variate polynomial of degree $r$ by evaluating it on all points in $\{0,1\}^m$. We denote this code by $RM(m,r)$. The minimal distance of $RM(m,r)$ is $2^{m-r}$ and so it cannot correct more than half that number of errors in the worst case. For random errors one may hope for a better result. In this work we give an efficient algorithm (in the block length $n=2^m$) for decoding random errors in Reed-Muller codes far beyond the minimal distance. Specifically, for low rate codes (of degree $r=o(\sqrt{m})$) we can correct a random set of $(1/2-o(1))n$ errors with high probability. For high rate codes (of degree $m-r$ for $r=o(\sqrt{m/\log m})$), we can correct roughly $m^{r/2}$ errors. More generally, for any integer $r$, our algorithm can correct any error pattern in $RM(m,m-(2r+2))$ for which the same erasure pattern can be corrected in $RM(m,m-(r+1))$. The results above are obtained by applying recent results of Abbe, Shpilka and Wigderson (STOC, 2015), Kumar and Pfister (2015) and Kudekar et al. (2015) regarding the ability of Reed-Muller codes to correct random erasures. The algorithm is based on solving a carefully defined set of linear equations and thus it is significantly different than other algorithms for decoding Reed-Muller codes that are based on the recursive structure of the code. It can be seen as a more explicit proof of a result of Abbe et al. that shows a reduction from correcting erasures to correcting errors, and it also bares some similarities with the famous Berlekamp-Welch algorithm for decoding Reed-Solomon codes.