CrossMPT: Cross-attention Message-passing Transformer for Error Correcting Codes

Error correcting codes (ECCs) are indispensable for reliable transmission in communication systems. Recent advancements in deep learning have catalyzed the exploration of ECC decoders based on neural networks. Among these, transformer-based neural decoders have achieved state-of-the-art decoding performance. In this paper, we propose a novel Cross-Attention Message-Passing Transformer (CrossMPT), which shares key operational principles with conventional message-passing decoders. While conventional transformer-based decoders employ a self-attention mechanism without distinguishing between magnitude and syndrome embeddings, CrossMPT updates these two types of embeddings separately and iteratively via two masked cross-attention blocks. The mask matrices are determined by the code's parity-check matrix, which explicitly captures and removes irrelevant relationships between the magnitude and syndrome embeddings. Our experimental results show that CrossMPT significantly outperforms existing neural network-based decoders for various code classes. Notably, CrossMPT achieves this decoding performance improvement while significantly reducing memory usage, computational complexity, inference time, and training time.