Search any document by how it looks, not just the text it contains.

What it is · Give Claude eyes · How it works · Pipelines

---

pip install pixelrag  # TODO: not on PyPI yet — publish, then this is the one-line install

The two core operations — render a page to screenshots, search a visual index:

# Render any page or document to screenshot tiles
pixelshot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python --output ./tiles

# Search a hosted index of 8.28M Wikipedia pages — no setup, runs against the live API
curl -X POST http://api.pixelrag.ai:30001/search \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"queries": [{"text": "What is the capital of France?"}], "n_docs": 5}'

Or try it in the browser at pixelrag.ai.

What it is

PixelRAG renders documents — web pages, PDFs, images — as screenshots and retrieves over the images directly. Visual structure that HTML parsing throws away — tables, charts, layout, infographics — stays intact, so the reader model can actually answer questions about it. Wikipedia's 8.28M articles ship as a pre-built index; the pipeline itself is general-purpose.

Give Claude eyes

The renderer also ships as a Claude Code plugin — the pixelbrowse skill. Instead of fetching raw HTML, Claude screenshots a page with pixelshot and reads the image, so it sees charts, diagrams, tables, and layout the way a person does.

# One-time setup
./plugin/setup.sh

# Then run it in one shot — claude -p with the plugin:
claude --plugin-dir ./plugin -p "screenshot https://news.ycombinator.com and summarize the top stories"
claude --plugin-dir ./plugin -p "screenshot https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.12387 and explain the key findings"
claude --plugin-dir ./plugin -p "screenshot http://localhost:3000 and tell me if anything looks broken"

Or interactively — claude --plugin-dir ./plugin, then /screenshot https://example.com. No MCP server, no backend: the skill just calls pixelshot (Playwright/CDP) on your machine.

How it works

Text-based RAG parses the page to text chunks and loses the table — the reader can't find the answer. PixelRAG renders the page to screenshot tiles, retrieves the right tile, and the reader reads the number straight off the image.

Two pieces make this work: (1) rendering documents to images instead of parsing them to text, and (2) a Qwen3-VL-Embedding model, LoRA-fine-tuned on screenshot data, that embeds page images into a space where visual content is retrievable.

Pipelines

Capture is the standalone pixelshot command; the rest of the pipeline runs through the pixelrag umbrella — pixelrag <stage>. Install only the stages you need:

Command	What it does	Install
pixelshot	Document → image tiles (Playwright CDP, PDF)	pip install pixelrag
pixelrag chunk · embed · build-index	Tiles → vectors → FAISS index	pip install 'pixelrag[embed]'
pixelrag index	Orchestrates the full pipeline: source → ingest → embed → index	pip install 'pixelrag[index]'
pixelrag serve	FAISS search API (FastAPI, CPU or GPU)	pip install 'pixelrag[serve]'
pixelrag-train	LoRA fine-tuning for Qwen3-VL-Embedding	cd train && uv sync

render ←── index ──→ embed       serve (independent)       train → serve (HTTP)

train is a separate uv project with its own pinned env (torch==2.9.1+cu129, transformers==4.57.1, cuDNN 9.20) — install it from inside train/, not from the root.

Search a pre-built index

pip install 'pixelrag[serve]'

# Download the pre-built Wikipedia index (8.28M pages) from Hugging Face
# TODO: publish the index to Hugging Face, then replace <HF_REPO> below
huggingface-cli download <HF_REPO> --repo-type dataset --local-dir ./index

# Serve, then query
pixelrag serve --index-dir ./index --port 30001

curl -X POST http://localhost:30001/search \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"queries": [{"text": "What is the capital of France?"}], "n_docs": 5}'

Build an index from your own documents

pip install 'pixelrag[index]'

# Create pixelrag.yaml
cat > pixelrag.yaml << 'EOF'
source:
  type: local
  path: ./my_docs

embed:
  model: Qwen/Qwen3-VL-Embedding-2B
  device: cuda
  gpu_ids: [0]

output: ./my_index
EOF

# Build, then serve
pixelrag index build
pixelrag serve --index-dir ./my_index --port 30001

Render a page programmatically

from pixelrag_render import render_url

# render a single page to tiles — e.g. for an agent to read
tiles = render_url("https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python", "./tiles")

Embed tools (standalone)

Each stage runs independently, without the orchestrator:

pip install 'pixelrag[embed]'

pixelrag chunk --tiles-dir ./tiles
pixelrag embed --shard-dir ./tiles --output-dir ./embeddings --gpu-ids 0,1
pixelrag build-index --embeddings-dir ./embeddings --output-dir ./index

Training

pixelrag-train LoRA fine-tunes Qwen/Qwen3-VL-Embedding-2B for webpage retrieval. See train/README.md for the full recipe.

You don't need to retrain to use the model — the trained adapters are published at Chrisyichuan/wiki-screenshot-embedding-lora.

We also release the full training set (Chrisyichuan/screenshot-training-natural-filtered-v2), so you can adapt other backbones yourself — a larger Qwen, or any other embedding model.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Rulin Shao for support.

Thanks also to Claude Code and OpenAI Codex for supporting open-source contributors with credits and plans, which we earned by working on LEANN.

This work is done by the Berkeley Sky Computing Lab, BAIR, and the Berkeley NLP Group.

License

Apache-2.0