Most of today's communication systems are designed to target reliable message recovery after receiving the entire encoded message (codeword). However, in many practical scenarios, the transmission process may be interrupted before receiving the complete codeword. This paper proposes a novel rateless autoencoder (AE)-based code design suitable for decoding the transmitted message before the noisy codeword is fully received. Using particular dropout strategies applied during the training process, rateless AE codes allow to trade off between decoding delay and reliability, providing a graceful improvement of the latter with each additionally received codeword symbol. The proposed rateless AEs significantly outperform the conventional AE designs for scenarios where it is desirable to trade off reliability for lower decoding delay.

翻译：当今大多数通信系统的设计目标是在接收到整个编码消息（码字）后实现可靠的消息恢复。然而，在许多实际场景中，传输过程可能在完整码字接收完成之前被中断。本文提出一种新颖的基于无速率自编码器（AE）的码设计，适用于在噪声码字完全接收之前对传输消息进行解码。通过在训练过程中应用特定的丢弃策略，无速率自编码器码能够在解码延迟与可靠性之间进行权衡，使得随着额外接收到的每个码字符号，后者能够实现平滑提升。在需要以可靠性换取更低解码延迟的场景中，所提出的无速率自编码器显著优于传统的自编码器设计。