Oblivious Deletion Codes

We construct deletion error-correcting codes in the oblivious model, where errors are adversarial but oblivious to the encoder's randomness. Oblivious errors bridge the gap between the adversarial and random error models, and are motivated by applications like DNA storage, where the noise is caused by hard-to-model physical phenomena, but not by an adversary. (1) (Explicit oblivious) We construct $t$ oblivious deletion codes, with redundancy $\sim 2t\log n$, matching the existential bound for adversarial deletions. (2) (List decoding implies explicit oblivious) We show that explicit list-decodable codes yield explicit oblivious deletion codes with essentially the same parameters. By a work of Guruswami and Håstad (IEEE TIT, 2021), this gives 2 oblivious deletion codes with redundancy $\sim 3\log n$, beating the existential redundancy for 2 adversarial deletions. (3) (Randomized oblivious) We give a randomized construction of oblivious codes that, with probability at least $1-2^{-n}$, produces a code correcting $t$ oblivious deletions with redundancy $\sim(t+1)\log n$, beating the existential adversarial redundancy of $\sim 2t\log n$. (4) (Randomized adversarial) Studying the oblivious model can inform better constructions of adversarial codes. The same technique produces, with probability at least $1-2^{-n}$, a code correcting $t$ adversarial deletions with redundancy $\sim (2t+1)\log n$, nearly matching the existential redundancy of $\sim 2t\log n$. The common idea behind these results is to reduce the hash size by modding by a prime chosen (randomly) from a small subset, and including a small encoding of the prime in the hash.