An apparatus is configured to be employed within a user equipment (UE) device. The apparatus comprises baseband circuitry which includes a radio frequency (RF) interface and one or more processors. The one or more processors are configured to identify a plurality of monitoring occasions for a set of flexible control resource sets (CORESET); determine bit ordering for the plurality of monitoring occasions; generate hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) feedback based on the received downlink transmission; and incorporate the ordered plurality of monitoring occasions into the HARQ feedback.