LearnLens — A Study Assistant That Won't Guess

SHIV∆M — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 03:12:06 +0000

The problem
Long PDFs are difficult to search when you're studying. My friend was repeatedly going through notes and study material to find specific information.
I wanted to build something more useful than a generic chatbot:
What if the AI could answer questions from the study material — but refuse to answer when the material doesn't contain enough evidence?
What I built
LearnLens lets a user upload study PDFs and ask questions about them.
It:

extracts text while preserving page boundaries
chunks the document
generates BGE embeddings
stores vectors in PostgreSQL + pgvector
retrieves relevant passages
gives those passages to Gemma 3 4B
returns a grounded answer with page-level sources
refuses to guess when retrieval doesn't provide sufficient evidence The interesting part: "I won't guess" Most AI interfaces make it easy to assume that a confident-sounding answer is correct. LearnLens takes the opposite approach. If the retrieved material isn't sufficient, it responds: I couldn't find enough information in your uploaded study material to answer this reliably. I won't guess.

The system doesn't manufacture a confidence percentage. It uses retrieval evidence to determine whether there is enough supporting material to answer.

Demo
Live frontend: https://learn-lens-psi.vercel.app/
Demo video: https://youtu.be/TmwEB-ZvwCU
GitHub: https://github.com/shivamsinghx/LearnLens
Prize category- Best Use of Gemma

What's next

public backend deployment
more document formats
better retrieval evaluation
hybrid retrieval
additional open-weight models P.S- I'm currently working on it(project in progress)

HACKTOBERFEST '26

SHIV∆M — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 10:30:46 +0000

DEV Community: SHIV∆M

LearnLens — A Study Assistant That Won't Guess

HACKTOBERFEST '26