PixelRAG beats text parsers on accuracy and cuts AI agent token costs 10x

Most enterprise RAG pipelines start the same way: a text parser converts web pages and documents into plain text so they can be chunked and indexed for retrieval. That conversion step destroys retrieval signals — and according to new research, it's responsible for the majority of wrong answers. A research team from UC Berkeley, Princeton University, EPFL and Databricks published a paper this week introducing PixelRAG, a system that skips that conversion entirely.