NL-CALIC Soft Decoding Using Strict Constrained Wide-Activated Recurrent Residual Network

In this work, we propose a normalized Tanh activate strategy and a lightweight wide-activate recurrent structure to solve three key challenges of the soft-decoding of near-lossless codes: 1. How to add an effective strict constrained peak absolute error (PAE) boundary to the network; 2. An end-to-end solution that is suitable for different quantization steps (compression ratios). 3. Simple structure that favors the GPU and FPGA implementation. To this end, we propose a Wide-activated Recurrent structure with a normalized Tanh activate strategy for Soft-Decoding (WRSD). Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed WRSD technique that WRSD outperforms better than the state-of-the-art soft decoders with less than 5% number of parameters, and every computation node of WRSD requires less than 64KB storage for the parameters which can be easily cached by most of the current consumer-level GPUs. Source code is available at https://github.com/dota-109/WRSD