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Comment by pushfoo | Hacker News Reader

You might be able to drop the PDF backend since they're close to getting HTML running well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38713215

Using that might be easier than a multi-modal approach. Bonus points for:

* Multiple papers at once

* Comparing PDF and HTML output with the LLM as input for it correcting similar converter code

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Definitely I'll move to the LaTeX source code instead of a PDF backend since that allows better support for non textual data that gets poorly scraped by GROBID. That is a really cool development I didn't know about, also theres https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/ which already has most arXiv papers as HTML documents. I chose GROBID because they not only parse the PDF but organize the text into logical sections for me (Intro, abstract, references) which I didn't want to manually do with heuristics that I'd have to devise.

Maybe you could use: https://github.com/facebookresearch/nougat/tree/main or https://github.com/VikParuchuri/marker

Both are tools to convert pdfs into Latex or Markup with latex formulas. Maybe that helps

Reading the motivation for the second:

"Relying on autoregressive forward passes to generate text is slow and prone to hallucination/repetition. From the nougat paper: We observed [repetition] in 1.5% of pages in the test set, but the frequency increases for out-of-domain documents. In my anecdotal testing, repetitions happen on 5%+ of out-of-domain (non-arXiv) pages."

When these are fed in the next levels as inputs, isn't it even less surprising to get even more hallucinations/repetitions?

Yes, using the LaTeX source code (or HTML, once that becomes reliable and widely used) should be much more robust than PDF parsing.

That is a very good resource to save

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