Broad and Efficient PII Detection with Unified Labels

Abstract

Personally Identifiable Information (PII) detection models must efficiently find identifiers across diverse contexts while maintaining a low false-positive rate (FPR) on high-volume traffic. Recent detectors increasingly rely on complex architectures that raise deployment cost, yet many are fine-tuned on only a few synthetic datasets that limit their coverage. Combining public datasets is challenging because their taxonomies differ, and even after categories are mapped to a common schema, labels can disagree on what counts as a detection, producing inconsistent training and evaluation signals. To address these problems, we present a practical 141M-parameter encoder-based detector trained on 1.12 million examples from 77 public datasets, relabeled under a detailed definition of broad contextual detection for 12 structured PII categories. Evaluated on the AI4Privacy and Nemotron-PII benchmarks at a low-FPR operating point, our model achieves the highest recall against larger baselines in 11 of 14 comparisons under our labels and 9 of 14 under the original labels. Its largest recall gains include useful additional coverage, such as multilingual disclosures and IP addresses embedded in URLs. It achieves this with 2-10x higher throughput and 94-97% less peak GPU memory than the baselines, delivering leading detection performance at substantially lower cost.