Semantic SCL Decoding for Polar Codes
Abstract
Semantic error control coding (SECC) has emerged as a promising paradigm for improving communication reliability by exploiting the inherent structure and semantic dependencies of transmitted information. This paper proposes a semantic successive cancellation list (SCL) decoder for polar codes carrying natural-language text. A fine-tuned byte-level language model provides next-byte priors, which are converted into conditional bit costs and incorporated directly into the SCL path metric before each pruning step. This allows the decoder to jointly exploit channel reliability and source structure while retaining the conventional polar coding framework. The language model can also be invoked only for bytes whose channel decisions are unreliable, trading decoding performance for latency. Simulations for length-512 polar codes show substantial block error rate (BLER) improvements over conventional CRC-aided SCL (CA-SCL) decoding. At rate R=0.75 and list size L=16, the proposed decoder achieves more than 1 dB of gain in BLER compared to CA-SCL with the same L. Moreover, with L=8, it outperforms conventional CA-SCL with L=256 in terms of BLER, while requiring about one quarter of the decoding time of the latter in the evaluated software implementation.
Related
- Log Density Spectrum Based Decoding of Polar Codes for Channels with Strong Phase Noise
- PMR-Aided Shifted-Pruning SCL-Flip Decoding for CRC-Aided Polar Codes
- Iterative Semantic Decoding for Short Block Codes
- Efficient Perturbation-Based SC Decoding for Long Polar Codes
- Parallel Successive Cancellation Perturbation-Enhanced Decoding of Polar Codes via Offline Variance Design
BibTeX
@misc{huang2026semantic,
title = {{Semantic SCL Decoding for Polar Codes}},
author = {Andy Huang and Chentao Yue and Branka Vucetic and Yonghui Li},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.34729},
eprint = {2610.34729},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34729},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Semantic SCL Decoding for Polar Codes
AU - Andy Huang
AU - Chentao Yue
AU - Branka Vucetic
AU - Yonghui Li
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/26
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.34729
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34729
AB - Semantic error control coding (SECC) has emerged as a promising paradigm for improving communication reliability by exploiting the inherent structure and semantic dependencies of transmitted information. This paper proposes a semantic successive cancellation list (SCL) decoder for polar codes carrying natural-language text. A fine-tuned byte-level language model provides next-byte priors, which are converted into conditional bit costs and incorporated directly into the SCL path metric before each pruning step. This allows the decoder to jointly exploit channel reliability and source structure while retaining the conventional polar coding framework. The language model can also be invoked only for bytes whose channel decisions are unreliable, trading decoding performance for latency. Simulations for length-512 polar codes show substantial block error rate (BLER) improvements over conventional CRC-aided SCL (CA-SCL) decoding. At rate R=0.75 and list size L=16, the proposed decoder achieves more than 1 dB of gain in BLER compared to CA-SCL with the same L. Moreover, with L=8, it outperforms conventional CA-SCL with L=256 in terms of BLER, while requiring about one quarter of the decoding time of the latter in the evaluated software implementation.
ER -