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Ingesting PDFs and why Gemini 2.0 changes everything

sergey.fyi

11–20 of 456 posts

Re: Ingesting PDFs and why Gemini 2.0 changes everything

#11
One major takeaway that matches my own investigation is that Gemini 2.0 still materially struggles with bounding boxes on digital content. Google has published[1] some great material on spatial understanding and bounding boxes on photography, but identifying sections of text or digital graphics like icons in a presentation is still very hit and miss.

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[1]: https://github.com/google-gemini/cookbook/blob/a916686f95f43...

Re: Ingesting PDFs and why Gemini 2.0 changes everything

#13

I wonder how this compares to open source models (which might be less accurate but even cheaper if self-hosted?), e.g. Llama 3.2. I'll see if I can run the benchmark. Also regarding the failure case in the footnote, I think Gemini actually got that right (or at least outperformed Reducto) - the original document seems to have what I call a "3D" table where the third axis is rows within each cell, and having multiple…

Everything I tried previously had very disappointing results. I was trying to get rid of Azure's DocumentIntelligence, which is kind of expensive at scale. The models could often output a portion of a table, but it was nearly impossible to get them to produce a structured output of a large table on a single page; they'd often insert "...rest of table follows" and similar terminations, regardless of different kinds of prompting.

Maybe incremental processing of chunks of the table would have worked, with subsequent stitching, but if Gemini can just process it that would be pretty good.

Re: Ingesting PDFs and why Gemini 2.0 changes everything

#14
This is what I am trying to figure out how to solve.

My problem statement is:

- Injest PDFs, summarize, and extract important information.

- Have some way to overlay the extracted information on the pdf in the UI.

- User can provide feedback on the overlaid info by accepting or rejecting the highlights as useful or not.

- This info goes back in to the model for reinforced learning.

Hoping to find something that can make this more manageable.

Re: Ingesting PDFs and why Gemini 2.0 changes everything

#15
post #6

Been toying with the flash model. Not the top model, but think it'll see plenty use due to the details. Wins on things other than top of benchmark logs * Generous free tier * Huge context window * Lite version feels basically instant However * Lite model seems more prone to repeating itself / looping * Very confusing naming e.g. {model}-latest worked for 1.5 but now its {model}-001? The lite has a date appended, the…

> * Huge context window But how well does it actually handle that context window? E.g. a lot of models support 200K context, but the LLM can only really work with ~80K or so of it before it starts to get confused.

My experience is that Gemini works relatively well on larger contexts. Not perfect, but more reliable.

Re: Ingesting PDFs and why Gemini 2.0 changes everything

#16
post #6

Been toying with the flash model. Not the top model, but think it'll see plenty use due to the details. Wins on things other than top of benchmark logs * Generous free tier * Huge context window * Lite version feels basically instant However * Lite model seems more prone to repeating itself / looping * Very confusing naming e.g. {model}-latest worked for 1.5 but now its {model}-001? The lite has a date appended, the…

> * Huge context window But how well does it actually handle that context window? E.g. a lot of models support 200K context, but the LLM can only really work with ~80K or so of it before it starts to get confused.

I'm sure someone will do a haystack test, but from my casual testing it seems pretty good

Re: Ingesting PDFs and why Gemini 2.0 changes everything

#18
post #6

Been toying with the flash model. Not the top model, but think it'll see plenty use due to the details. Wins on things other than top of benchmark logs * Generous free tier * Huge context window * Lite version feels basically instant However * Lite model seems more prone to repeating itself / looping * Very confusing naming e.g. {model}-latest worked for 1.5 but now its {model}-001? The lite has a date appended, the…

> * Huge context window But how well does it actually handle that context window? E.g. a lot of models support 200K context, but the LLM can only really work with ~80K or so of it before it starts to get confused.

it works REALLY well. I have used it to dump many references codes and then help me write a new modules etc. I have gone up to 200k tokens I think with no problems in recall.

Re: Ingesting PDFs and why Gemini 2.0 changes everything

#20
>Unfortunately Gemini really seems to struggle on this, and no matter how we tried prompting it, it would generate wildly inaccurate bounding boxes

This is what I have found as well. From what I've read, LLMS do not work well with images for specific details due to image encoders which are too lossy. (No idea if this is actually correct.) For now I guess you can use regular OCR to get bounding boxes.

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