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Next-generation channel coding has stringent demands on throughput, energy consumption, and error rate performance while maintaining key features of 5G New Radio (NR) standard codes such as rate compatibility, which is a significant challenge. Due to excellent capacity-achieving performance, spatially-coupled low-density parity-check (SC-LDPC) codes are considered a promising candidate for next-generation channel coding. In this paper, we propose an SC-LDPC code family called edge-spreading Raptor-like (ESRL) codes for 6G. Unlike other SC-LDPC codes that adopt the structure of existing rate-compatible LDPC block codes before coupling, ESRL codes maximize the possible locations of edge placement and focus on constructing an optimal coupled matrix. Moreover, a new graph representation called the unified graph is introduced. This graph offers a global perspective on ESRL codes and identifies the optimal edge reallocation to optimize the spreading strategy. We conduct comprehensive comparisons of ESRL codes and 5G-NR LDPC codes. Simulation results demonstrate that when all decoding parameters and complexity are the same, ESRL codes have obvious advantages in error rate performance and throughput compared to 5G-NR LDPC codes, making them a promising solution towards next-generation channel coding., Comment: 13 pages, 14 figures

We report the recent discovery of two new eruptions of the recurrent nova M31N 2017-01e in the Andromeda galaxy. The latest eruption, M31N 2024-08c, reached $R=17.8$ on 2024 August 06.85 UT, $\sim2$ months earlier than predicted. In addition to this recent eruption, a search of archival PTF data has revealed a previously unreported eruption on 2014 June 18.46 UT that reached a peak brightness of $R\sim17.9$ approximately a day later. The addition of these two eruption timings has allowed us to update the mean recurrence time of the nova. We find $\langle T_\mathrm{rec} \rangle = 924.0\pm7.0$ days ($2.53\pm0.02$ yr), which is slightly shorter than our previous determination. Thus, M31N 2017-01e remains the nova with the second shortest recurrence time known, with only M31N 2008-12a being shorter. We also present a low-resolution spectrum of the likely quiescent counterpart of the nova, a $\sim20.5$ mag evolved B star displaying an $\sim14.3$ d photometric modulation., Comment: 6 pages; 1 multi-panel figure; 1 table; expanded references; accepted for publication in the Research Notes of the AAS

Node-based successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding has received considerable attention in wireless communications for its significant reduction in decoding latency, particularly with 5G New Radio (NR) polar codes. However, the existing node-based SCL decoders are constrained by sequential processing, leading to complicated and data-dependent computational units that introduce unavoidable stalls, reducing hardware efficiency. In this paper, we present a frame-interleaving hardware architecture for a generalized node-based SCL decoder. By efficiently reusing otherwise idle computational units, two independent frames can be decoded simultaneously, resulting in a significant throughput gain. Based on this new architecture, we further exploit graph ensembles to diversify the decoding space, thus enhancing the error-correcting performance with a limited list size. Two dynamic strategies are proposed to eliminate the residual stalls in the decoding schedule, which eventually results in nearly 2x throughput compared to the state-of-the-art baseline node-based SCL decoder. To impart the decoder rate flexibility, we develop a novel online instruction generator to identify the generalized nodes and produce instructions on-the-fly. The corresponding 28nm FD-SOI ASIC SCL decoder with a list size of 8 has a core area of 1.28 mm2 and operates at 692 MHz. It is compatible with all 5G NR polar codes and achieves a throughput of 3.34 Gbps and an area efficiency of 2.62 Gbps/mm2 for uplink (1024, 512) codes, which is 1.41x and 1.69x better than the state-of-the-art node-based SCL decoders., Comment: 13 pages, 16 figures, accepted by IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers

5G New Radio (NR) has stringent demands on both performance and complexity for the design of low-density parity-check (LDPC) decoding algorithms and corresponding VLSI implementations. Furthermore, decoders must fully support the wide range of all 5G NR blocklengths and code rates, which is a significant challenge. In this paper, we present a high-performance and low-complexity LDPC decoder, tailor-made to fulfill the 5G requirements. First, to close the gap between belief propagation (BP) decoding and its approximations in hardware, we propose an extension of adjusted min-sum decoding, called generalized adjusted min-sum (GA-MS) decoding. This decoding algorithm flexibly truncates the incoming messages at the check node level and carefully approximates the non-linear functions of BP decoding to balance the error-rate and hardware complexity. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed fixed-point GAMS has only a minor gap of 0.1 dB compared to floating-point BP under various scenarios of 5G standard specifications. Secondly, we present a fully reconfigurable 5G NR LDPC decoder implementation based on GA-MS decoding. Given that memory occupies a substantial portion of the decoder area, we adopt multiple data compression and approximation techniques to reduce 42.2% of the memory overhead. The corresponding 28nm FD-SOI ASIC decoder has a core area of 1.823 mm2 and operates at 895 MHz. It is compatible with all 5G NR LDPC codes and achieves a peak throughput of 24.42 Gbps and a maximum area efficiency of 13.40 Gbps/mm2 at 4 decoding iterations., Comment: 14 pages, 15 figures, accepted by IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Paper

Visual objects often have acoustic signatures that are naturally synchronized with them in audio-bearing video recordings. For this project, we explore the multimodal feature aggregation for video instance segmentation task, in which we integrate audio features into our video segmentation model to conduct an audio-visual learning scheme. Our method is based on existing video instance segmentation method which leverages rich contextual information across video frames. Since this is the first attempt to investigate the audio-visual instance segmentation, a novel dataset, including 20 vocal classes with synchronized video and audio recordings, is collected. By utilizing combined decoder to fuse both video and audio features, our model shows a slight improvements compared to the base model. Additionally, we managed to show the effectiveness of different modules by conducting extensive ablations., Comment: Research project for Introduction to Deep Learning (11785) at Carnegie Mellon University

Owing to its high parallelism, belief propagation (BP) decoding is highly amenable to high-throughput implementations and thus represents a promising solution for meeting the ultra-high peak data rate of future communication systems. However, for polar codes, the error-correcting performance of BP decoding is far inferior to that of the widely used CRC-aided successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding algorithm. To close the performance gap to SCL, BP list (BPL) decoding expands the exploration of candidate codewords through multiple permuted factor graphs (PFGs). From an implementation perspective, designing a unified and flexible hardware architecture for BPL decoding that supports various PFGs and code configurations presents a big challenge. In this paper, we propose the first hardware implementation of a BPL decoder for polar codes and overcome the implementation challenge by applying a hardware-friendly algorithm that generates flexible permutations on-the-fly. First, we derive the graph selection gain and provide a sequential generation (SG) algorithm to obtain a near-optimal PFG set. We further prove that any permutation can be decomposed into a combination of multiple fixed routings, and we design a low-complexity permutation network to satisfy the decoding schedule. Our BPL decoder not only has a low decoding latency by executing the decoding and permutation generation in parallel, but also supports an arbitrary list size without any area overhead. Experimental results show that, for length-1024 polar codes with a code rate of one-half, our BPL decoder with 32 PFGs has a similar error-correcting performance to SCL with a list size of 4 and achieves a throughput of 25.63 Gbps and an area efficiency of 29.46 Gbps/mm$^{2}$ at SNR=4.0dB, which is 1.82$\times$ and 4.33$\times$ faster than the state-of-the-art BP flip and SCL decoders,~respectively

The recently proposed recursive projection-aggregation (RPA) decoding algorithm for Reed-Muller codes has received significant attention as it provides near-ML decoding performance at reasonable complexity for short codes. However, its complicated structure makes it unsuitable for hardware implementation. Iterative projection-aggregation (IPA) decoding is a modified version of RPA decoding that simplifies the hardware implementation. In this work, we present a flexible hardware architecture for the IPA decoder that can be configured from fully-sequential to fully-parallel, thus making it suitable for a wide range of applications with different constraints and resource budgets. Our simulation and implementation results show that the IPA decoder has 41% lower area consumption, 44% lower latency, four times higher throughput, but currently seven times higher power consumption for a code with block length of 128 and information length of 29 compared to a state-of-the-art polar successive cancellation list (SCL) decoder with comparable decoding performance.

Due to the low-latency and high-reliability requirements of 5G, low-complexity node-based successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding has received considerable attention for use in 5G communications systems. By identifying special constituent codes in the decoding tree and immediately decoding these, node-based SCL decoding provides a significant reduction in decoding latency compared to conventional SCL decoding. However, while there exists many types of nodes, the current node-based SCL decoders are limited by the lack of a more generalized node that can efficiently decode a larger number of different constituent codes to further reduce the decoding time. In this paper, we extend a recent generalized node, the sequence repetition (SR) node to SCL decoding and we describe the first implementation of an SR-List decoder. By merging certain SR-List decoding operations and applying various optimizations for 5G New Radio (NR) polar codes, our optimized SR-List decoding algorithm increases the throughput by almost ${2\times}$ compared to a similar state-of-the-art node-based SCL decoder. We also present our hardware implementation of the optimized SR-List decoding algorithm which supports all 5G NR polar codes. Synthesis results show that our SR-List decoder can achieve a $2.94 \, \mathrm{Gbps}$ throughput and $6.70\, \mathrm{Gbps} / \mathrm{mm}^2$ area efficiency for ${L=8}$.