A Galois Connection Approach to Wei-Type Duality Theorems

Abstract

In 1991, Wei proved a duality theorem that established an interesting connection between the generalized Hamming weights of a linear code and those of its dual code. Wei’s duality theorem has since been extensively studied from different perspectives and extended to other settings. In this paper, we re-examine Wei’s duality theorem and its various extensions, henceforth referred to as Wei-type duality theorems, from a new Galois connection perspective. Our approach is based on the observation that the generalized Hamming weights and the dimension/length profiles of a linear code form a Galois connection. The central result of this paper is a general Wei-type duality theorem for two Galois connections between finite subsets of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mathbb {Z}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> , from which all the known Wei-type duality theorems can be recovered. As corollaries of our central result, we prove new Wei-type duality theorems for <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$w$ </tex-math></inline-formula> -demi-matroids defined over finite sets and <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$w$ </tex-math></inline-formula> -demi-polymatroids defined over modules with a composition series, which further allows us to unify and generalize all the known Wei-type duality theorems established for codes endowed with various metrics.