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Adaptive PDFs

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Re: Adaptive PDFs

#21

Post by dmlittle »

gnunicorn wrote: post #6

Just because everything is a potential threat vector now: doesn't this also mean you could easily put AI specific malicious instructions into the PDF that the regular human would never notice? Like the "white text between the lines that only appears when copy-pasted"-hack that some professors have been doing in their exercises to their students to include pink elephants in the output and stuff. But worse. Just thinki…

Yes, although that's not new. The amount of different exploits and RCE I've seen in the past decade from just "opening" an PDF is mind blowing. Not sure if it's slowed down but around 8 years ago ghostcript would patch a couple of RCE from PDF processing every few months.

Re: Adaptive PDFs

#22

Post by m348e912 »

tombert wrote: post #20

I always export my Typst with PDF/A. It basically guarantees maximal compatibility and none of the annoying dynamic bullshit. I wish everyone would do this, at least for documents that don't need the fancy dynamic PDF features.

I don't even know how to export as PDF/A. Seems like we'd be better off saving the PDFs as gifs and uploading them to LLMs at this point.

Re: Adaptive PDFs

#23

Post by SarthakGaud »

gpvos wrote: post #4

I would suggest changing the title to the actual title of the article: Adaptive PDFs. Assuming the program works, the PDF will not actually look different to me than to anyone else looking at it, so there is nothing that "changes based on who is reading". It is just that text extraction, a wholly different (and much fuzzier) process than viewing the PDF, and something that the same person can do, will now return stru…

Thanks, the title was little misleading, I just changed it.

Re: Adaptive PDFs

#24

Post by SarthakGaud »

Xotic007 wrote: post #13

Cool but it's relying on every extractor honoring that replacement-text property which you said yourself is hit or miss. So it's clean markdown until someone runs it through a tool that ignores it and quietly gets the messy version and has no idea that happened.

From my trials, it fails with OCR but works with popular libs like pypdf2 etc

Re: Adaptive PDFs

#25

Post by SarthakGaud »

jheimark wrote: post #3
jheimark wrote: post #2

This looks really interesting. Optimizing for humans vs. agents feels like the new wave of Desktop vs. Mobile (where mobile won) - agents are going to win even faster. Where is the repo? It's mentioned but I can't find it.

is it this one? https://github.com/iminoaru/adaptivepdf

yes this is the one, its my account

Re: Adaptive PDFs

#26

Post by [deleted] »

gpvos wrote: post #4

I would suggest changing the title to the actual title of the article: Adaptive PDFs. Assuming the program works, the PDF will not actually look different to me than to anyone else looking at it, so there is nothing that "changes based on who is reading". It is just that text extraction, a wholly different (and much fuzzier) process than viewing the PDF, and something that the same person can do, will now return stru…

[deleted]

Re: Adaptive PDFs

#27

Post by mschuster91 »

> The advantage isn't fewer tokens. It's that the same tokens now carry structure.

> Headings, lists, structure. One file, no separate versions, no conversion step.

... and I guess that AI wasn't just used as a target to write the software against, but also to fluff up the PR piece?

Re: Adaptive PDFs

#28

Post by LPisGood »

gnunicorn wrote: post #6

Just because everything is a potential threat vector now: doesn't this also mean you could easily put AI specific malicious instructions into the PDF that the regular human would never notice? Like the "white text between the lines that only appears when copy-pasted"-hack that some professors have been doing in their exercises to their students to include pink elephants in the output and stuff. But worse. Just thinki…

Oh this happens all the time. When Apple announced they would be scanning everyone’s private iCloud data for CSAM, they had some “PSI” system which would at some point consider the content of a grayscale and reduced quality version of the image.

The problem is that security researchers for years have known about pre-processing attacks where photos which appear as one thing (a dog in a yard) appear ad something completely different (a cat on a couch) once put through machine learning pre-processing.

Re: Adaptive PDFs

#29

Post by mschuster91 »

gnunicorn wrote: post #6

Just because everything is a potential threat vector now: doesn't this also mean you could easily put AI specific malicious instructions into the PDF that the regular human would never notice? Like the "white text between the lines that only appears when copy-pasted"-hack that some professors have been doing in their exercises to their students to include pink elephants in the output and stuff. But worse. Just thinki…

> Just because everything is a potential threat vector now: doesn't this also mean you could easily put AI specific malicious instructions into the PDF that the regular human would never notice?

Yup and there's so many memes floating around regarding that being used to bypass AI "resume reviewers" that it got academically reviewed [1].

[1] https://arxiv.org/html/2605.28999v1

Re: Adaptive PDFs

#30

Post by Xotic007 »

SarthakGaud wrote: post #24
Xotic007 wrote: post #13

Cool but it's relying on every extractor honoring that replacement-text property which you said yourself is hit or miss. So it's clean markdown until someone runs it through a tool that ignores it and quietly gets the messy version and has no idea that happened.

From my trials, it fails with OCR but works with popular libs like pypdf2 etc

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