High-rate codes with sublinear-time decoding

Locally decodable codes are error-correcting codes that admit efficient decoding algorithms; any bit of the original message can be recovered by looking at only a small number of locations of a corrupted codeword. The tradeoff between the rate of a code and the locality/efficiency of its decoding algorithms has been well studied, and it has widely been suspected that nontrivial locality must come at the price of low rate. A particular setting of potential interest in practice is codes of constant rate. For such codes, decoding algorithms with locality O(k∈) were known only for codes of rate ∈Ω(1/∈), where k is the length of the message. Furthermore, for codes of rate > 1/2, no nontrivial locality had been achieved. In this article, we construct a new family of locally decodable codes that have very efficient local decoding algorithms, and at the same time have rate approaching 1. We show that for every ∈ > 0 and α > 0, for infinitely many k, there exists a code C which encodes messages of length k with rate 1 − α, and is locally decodable from a constant fraction of errors using O(k∈) queries and time. These codes, which we call multiplicity codes, are based on evaluating multivariate polynomials and their derivatives. Multiplicity codes extend traditional multivariate polynomial codes; they inherit the local-decodability of these codes, and at the same time achieve better tradeoffs and flexibility in the rate and minimum distance.