arXiv:2610.21279v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose a novel soft-aided hard-decision decoding scheme for product codes based on two-bit quantized reliability markers. In particular, one bit is used for a two-level tolerance miscorrection check to validate the bounded distance decoding (BDD) result, while the other identifies bits to be randomly flipped upon BDD failure and miscorrection. List decoding is incorporated to further facilitate the error performance. Density evolution is performed for the design of the quantization thresholds. Compared to iterative BDD, the proposed scheme requires only moderate increases in memory and computational overhead. Simulation results verify that our scheme outperforms several unquantized soft-aided decoders, while maintaining small memory costs and low BDD attempts.