Interactive error resilience beyond 2/7

Abstract

Interactive error correcting codes can protect interactive communication protocols against a constant fraction of adversarial errors, while incurring only a constant multiplicative overhead in the total communication. What is the maximum fraction of errors that such codes can protect against?

For the non-adaptive channel, where the parties must agree in advance on the order in which they communicate, Braverman and Rao prove that the maximum error resilience is 1/4 (STOC, 2011). Ghaffari, Haeupler, and Sudan (STOC, 2014) consider the adaptive channel, where the order in which the parties communicate may not be fixed, and give a clever protocol that is resilient to a 2/7 fraction of errors. This was believed to be optimal.

We revisit this result, and show how to overcome the 2/7 barrier. Specifically, we show that, over the adaptive channel, every two-party communication protocol can be converted to a protocol that is resilient to 7/24 > 2/7 fraction of errors with only a constant multiplicative overhead to the total communication. The protocol is obtained by a novel implementation of a feedback mechanism over the adaptive channel.