  We consider the weighted belief-propagation (WBP) decoder recently proposed
by Nachmani et al. where different weights are introduced for each Tanner graph
edge and optimized using machine learning techniques. Our focus is on
simple-scaling models that use the same weights across certain edges to reduce
the storage and computational burden. The main contribution is to show that
simple scaling with few parameters often achieves the same gain as the full
parameterization. Moreover, several training improvements for WBP are proposed.
For example, it is shown that minimizing average binary cross-entropy is
suboptimal in general in terms of bit error rate (BER) and a new "soft-BER"
loss is proposed which can lead to better performance. We also investigate
parameter adapter networks (PANs) that learn the relation between the
signal-to-noise ratio and the WBP parameters. As an example, for the (32,16)
Reed-Muller code with a highly redundant parity-check matrix, training a PAN
with soft-BER loss gives near-maximum-likelihood performance assuming simple
scaling with only three parameters.
