PixelRAG is a retrieval system that turns web pages, PDFs and images into screenshot tiles and searches those images instead of extracted text. It is the official code for the arXiv paper "PIXELRAG: Web Screenshots Beat Text for Retrieval-Augmented Generation", written by researchers at Berkeley SkyLab, BAIR and Berkeley NLP. The pipeline runs in stages. pixelshot renders a document into tiles with a headless Chromium browser driven over CDP. The pixelrag command then chunks and embeds the tiles with Qwen3-VL-Embedding and LoRA adapters fine-tuned on screenshot data, builds a FAISS index, and serves search through a FastAPI app on CPU or GPU. Each stage is its own pip extra, so a project installs only the parts it uses. The team also runs a hosted index of 8.28M Wikipedia pages behind a live API, which takes text or image queries; the README says it needs no API key. The renderer doubles as a Claude Code plugin called pixelbrowse, which has Claude screenshot a page and read the image, and as an npm package for opencode. Training code sits in a separate train/ project with its own pinned PyTorch and transformers versions.
- Stars
- 10K
- Language
- Python
- License
- Apache-2.0
- Momentum
- Established
