A New Approach to Code Smoothing Bounds

Abstract

Code smoothing is a phenomenon in which an error distribution makes a code statistically close to the uniform distribution over the ambient space. This closeness is measured by total variation distance. Recently, Debris-Alazard et al.\ introduced a smoothing bound, which is an upper bound on this total variation distance. Although the smoothing bound evaluates how the error distribution smooths a code, this bound applies only to linear codes. In this paper, we generalize this bound to not only linear codes but also specific non-linear codes. While the smoothing bound in previous work was obtained by Fourier analysis over finite abelian groups, we derive this bound using a graph-theoretic approach. To derive the smoothing bound, we consider code smoothing as the mixing of random walks on a specific graph, and use the concept of equitable partitions, which is well-studied in graph theory.