Coding for Interactive Communication with Small Memory and Applications to Robust Circuits

Abstract: Classically, coding theory has been concerned with the problem of transmitting a single message in a format which is robust to noise. Recently, researchers have turned their attention to designing coding schemes to make two-way conversations robust to noise. That is, given an interactive communication protocol $\Pi$, an \emph{interactive coding scheme} converts $\Pi$ into another communication protocol $\Pi'$ such that, even if errors are introduced during the execution of $\Pi'$, the parties are able to determine what the outcome of running $\Pi$ would be in a noise-free setting. We consider the problem of designing interactive coding schemes which allow the parties to simulate the original protocol using little memory. Specifically, given any communication protocol $\Pi$ we construct robust simulating protocols which tolerate a constant noise rate and require the parties to use only $O(\log d \log s)$ memory, where $d$ is the depth of $\Pi$ and $s$ is a measure of the size of $\Pi$. Prior to this work, all known coding schemes required the parties to use at least $\Omega(d)$ memory, as the parties were required to remember the transcript of the conversation thus far. Moreover, our coding scheme achieves a communication rate of $1-O(\sqrt{\varepsilon})$ over oblivious channels and $$1-O(\sqrt{\varepsilon\log\log\tfrac{1}{\varepsilon}})$$ over adaptive adversarial channels, matching the conjecturally optimal rates. Lastly, we point to connections between fault-tolerant circuits and coding for interactive communication with small memory.