ICML2026

Score Based Error Correcting Code Decoder

Alon Helvits, Eliya Nachmani

Abstract

Error-correcting codes enable reliable communication, yet practical soft decoding remains challenging across code families and block lengths. We propose SB-ECC, a score-based decoder that casts decoding as continuous-time denoising. A neural denoiser defines a probability-flow ordinary differential equation (ODE) that iteratively updates the noisy channel observation toward a valid codeword, guided by parity constraints. The model is trained across noise levels without time/SNR conditioning, enabling inference without SNR estimation and supporting a direct latency--accuracy trade-off controlled by the ODE solver budget. We use the raw signed channel observation as input for learning a continuous denoising field. Across 4242 code/SNR settings, SB-ECC achieves the best BER in 39/4239/42 entries, with an average SNR gain of 0.170.17 dB and a maximum gain of 0.460.46 dB over the strongest competing baseline, we showed that swapping the solver from Euler to DPM preserves ln(BER)-\ln(\mathrm{BER}) while reducing end-to-end decoding time by 8.86%8.86\% on average (up to 12.82%12.82\%).