Noisy decoding by shallow circuits with parities: classical and quantum

Abstract: We consider the problem of decoding corrupted error correcting codes with NC$^0[\oplus]$ circuits in the classical and quantum settings. We show that any such classical circuit can correctly recover only a vanishingly small fraction of messages, if the codewords are sent over a noisy channel with positive error rate. Previously this was known only for linear codes with large dual distance, whereas our result applies to any code. By contrast, we give a simple quantum circuit that correctly decodes the Hadamard code with probability $\Omega(\varepsilon^2)$ even if a $(1/2 - \varepsilon)$-fraction of a codeword is adversarially corrupted. Our classical hardness result is based on an equidistribution phenomenon for multivariate polynomials over a finite field under biased input-distributions. This is proved using a structure-versus-randomness strategy based on a new notion of rank for high-dimensional polynomial maps that may be of independent interest. Our quantum circuit is inspired by a non-local version of the Bernstein-Vazirani problem, a technique to generate ``poor man's cat states'' by Watts et al., and a constant-depth quantum circuit for the OR function by Takahashi and Tani.