PII model and benchmark report

Higher recall than any other PII detector.

Protegrity-PII is a 278M model that outperforms OpenAI, AWS and Microsoft in detection and classification of personal information. It scores 0.910 recall at 0.902 precision on the new PII-Scope benchmark, at a fraction of their time and cost.

Source text

Maya Patel asked us to update the delivery details for her order. Please use [email protected] for confirmations. Her callback number is 202-555-0147. The delivery address is 42 Willow Lane, Unit 3, Cedar Falls, IA 50613. Her date of birth is 14 May 1988, which was used to verify the request. Maya Patel confirmed that the updated details are correct.

Redacted text

[PERSON] asked us to update the delivery details for her order. Please use [EMAIL] for confirmations. Her callback number is [PHONE]. The delivery address is [ADDRESS]. Her date of birth is [DATE], which was used to verify the request. [PERSON] confirmed that the updated details are correct.

Hover, focus, or tap a highlighted value to highlight its matching redaction label.

Overview

Detection, speed and cost

Protegrity-PII outperforms other models on detection, speed and cost. It has the highest typed recall on PII-Scope, and can process 1M characters (~2,000 documents) in half a second for a fraction of a cent. Frontier models come closest on detection, but they take far longer at thousands of times the cost.

Detection, speed and cost radar for Protegrity-PII Six models compared across typed recall, speed and cost. Higher values on every axis indicate better performance. Speed and cost are log-scaled.
Protegrity-PII: typed recall 0.915 at 0.907 precision; 0.49 seconds per million characters; $0.0005 per million characters.

Protegrity-PII

Typed recall
0.915
at 0.907 precision
Seconds per million characters
0.49
on one RTX 6000
Cost per million characters
$0.0005
self-hosted on that GPU

Results

Recall that rivals frontier LLMs

Recall is the percentage of real personal information a model detects. In practice, every miss leaves personal information exposed. Typed recall is stricter, requiring correct detection and classification of personal information. F1 balances recall and precision.

Typed recall on PII-Scope · higher is better

  1. Protegrity-PII 0.910
  2. Claude Fable 5 0.848
  3. AWS Comprehend 0.460
  4. GLiNER2.5 Multi 0.422
  5. OpenAI Privacy Filter 0.389
  6. Microsoft Presidio 0.383
  7. Rampart 0.302
  • Protegrity-PII
  • Other detectors
  • Frontier LLM reference (closed API)

Cost and speed

A fraction of a cent for a million characters

A compact token classifier does the work that frontier models do with prompts. Against Claude Fable 5, running 64 streams at once on a single RTX 6000 Blackwell:

Protegrity-PII vs Claude Fable 5

  • ≈23,000× cheaper
  • ≈18,000× faster

Cost per million characters

  • Protegrity-PII $0.0005
  • AWS Comprehend $1.00
  • Claude Fable 5 $11.65

Time per million characters

  • Protegrity-PII 0.49 s
  • Claude Fable 5 8,905 s

Coverage

69 PII entity types, from names to neural data

A model cannot redact what it was never trained to label. Protegrity-PII learns a fine-grained taxonomy that is a superset of the native taxonomies of every model it was compared against.

Supported PII entity types (labels)

Supported by Protegrity-PII (69/69)

  • ACCESS_SECURITY_CODE
  • ACCOUNT_BALANCE
  • ACCOUNTNAME
  • ACCOUNTNUMBER
  • AGE
  • AMOUNT
  • BIC
  • BUILDING
  • CARD_EXPIRATION_DATE
  • CARD_SERVICE_CODE
  • CARD_TRACK_DATA
  • CCN
  • CITY
  • COMPANYNAME
  • COUNTRY
  • COUNTY
  • CREDIT_SCORE
  • CREDITCARDCVV
  • CRIMINAL_RECORD
  • CRYPTO_ADDRESS
  • CURRENCY
  • DATE
  • DEVICE_IDENTIFIER
  • DRIVERLICENSE
  • EMAIL
  • FAX_NUMBER
  • FINGERPRINT_DATA
  • GENDER
  • GENETIC_DATA
  • GEOCOORD
  • HEALTH_CONDITION
  • HEALTH_PLAN_BENEFICIARY_NUMBER
  • IBAN
  • IDCARD
  • IMMIGRATION_STATUS
  • INCOME
  • IP
  • LOGIN_CREDENTIAL
  • MAC
  • MEDICAL_RECORD_NUMBER
  • MOTHERS_MAIDEN_NAME
  • NAME
  • NEURAL_DATA
  • PASSPORT
  • PASSWORD
  • PHONE
  • PIN
  • PLACE_OF_BIRTH
  • POLITICAL_OPINION
  • PROFESSIONAL_LICENSE_NUMBER
  • RACE_ETHNICITY
  • RELIGIOUS_BELIEF
  • RETINA_SCAN_DATA
  • SECADDRESS
  • SEX_LIFE_DATA
  • SEXUAL_ORIENTATION
  • SSN
  • STATE
  • STREET
  • TIME
  • TITLE
  • TRACKING_IDENTIFIER
  • TRADE_UNION_MEMBERSHIP
  • TRANSACTION_HISTORY
  • URL
  • USERNAME
  • VEHICLE_IDENTIFICATION_NUMBER
  • VEHICLE_REGISTRATION
  • ZIPCODE

Benchmark

PII-Scope: the densest PII benchmark

The public PII datasets used were generated by LLMs, which leave some PII unlabeled. A model that correctly detects one of those entities is scored as wrong, penalizing the right answer. PII-Scope was built to avoid this: it is dense, varied and carefully labeled.

Entities per row · richer rows leave more room for error

  • PII-Scope 14.31
  • Nemotron-PII 8.15
  • SPY 6.82
  • Gretel 4.25
  • AI4Privacy 3.86
  • 8,030 rows across several domains
  • 1.8× the entity density of the next densest benchmark
  • Lowest overgeneration of the datasets we measured

Composition

Format

Other includes Other formats 22.3%, Support ticket 3.9%, Social media post 3.5%, Forum post 3.3%, Form data 2.5%, Meeting notes 2.0%, Markdown 1.0%.

Domain

Other includes Social media 4.9%, Legal 4.7%, Telecom 4.3%, Education 2.0%, Hospitality 1.6%, General 1.5%, Energy and utilities 1.4%, Travel 1.4%, Manufacturing 1.3%, Real estate 1.2%, Logistics 1.2%.

The model

A token classifier, calibrated for recall

Protegrity-PII is not a prompted LLM. It tags every token in one forward pass, fast enough for logs and agent workflows and small enough to run on premises.

  1. Source text
  2. Preprocessor

    1. Tokenized sliding windows
  3. PII model

    1. XLM-RoBERTa encoder
    2. Classification head
  4. BIO decoder

    1. Recall calibration
    2. Viterbi decoding
    3. Span generation
  5. Redacted text
Source text is split into tokenized sliding windows, passed through the XLM-RoBERTa encoder and classification head, then through recall calibration, Viterbi decoding, and span generation to produce redacted text.

How it was built

  • Built on XLM-RoBERTa

    A pretrained, multi-language encoder with a linear head that tags each token as outside, the beginning or inside of one of 69 entity types. It is trained on the full taxonomy directly.

  • Trained on 1.2M samples

    A synthetic dataset generated using the same technique as PII-Scope. It produced models with the highest scores on benchmarks they were not trained on.

  • Pruned and distilled

    After layers were pruned, the smaller model was trained further by distillation from the original. The result is about 25% smaller and faster, with ~97% of the recall.

Protegrity-PII Technical Report

Hardeep Bassi, Hui Ma, Luís Seabra, Koowum Joshi, Daniel Pereira, Averell Gatton

Protegrity · Menlo Park, CA · Stamford, CT · Lisbon