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旨在接收完整编码消息（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毕前中断。本文提出了一种新型无速率自编码器（AE）码设计，适用于在噪声码字被完全接收前对传输消息进行解码。通过在训练过程中采用特定的丢弃策略，无速率AE码允许在解码延迟与可靠性之间进行权衡，使得每多接收一个码字符号，可靠性都能得到渐进式提升。所提出的无速率AE码在需要权衡可靠性以降低解码延迟的场景中，其性能显著优于传统AE设计。