Nvidia's PixelUMM kills the VAE for raw pixels
Nvidia and the University of Waterloo just introduced PixelUMM, an open-source model that handles image and video understanding and generation directly in raw pixel space without a VAE or vision encoder. Built on Qwen3-8B, it runs all four multimodal tasks through a single decoder-only Transformer. Why it matters: Bypassing latent compression cuts down pipeline complexity and proves a unified raw-pixel approach is entirely feasible.