Masker Mini

Masker-mini is the on-device sibling of masker: a 6-layer distilled PII detector for 23 European languages that keeps ~99% of the teacher's strict-span F1 while shrinking to as little as 17 MB (4-bit Core ML).

It runs fully offline, no PII leaves the device.

artifact	format	size	strict F1
`model.safetensors`	PyTorch fp16	68 MB	0.965
`onnx/model_fp16.onnx`	ONNX fp16 (portable)	68 MB	0.965
`onnx/model_int4.onnx`	ONNX 4-bit (ONNX Runtime)	22 MB	0.965
`coreml/masker_mini_4bit.mlpackage`	Core ML 4-bit (Apple NE)	17 MB	0.965

Model type & training

Masker Mini is a 6-layer BERT-architecture token classifier (hidden size 384, 12 heads, ~35.6M parameters), a MiniLM-class encoder. It is trained by knowledge distillation from masker.

After distillation the vocabulary was frequency-pruned, shrinking the embedding table to land the whole network at ~35.6M parameters.

Three deployment artifacts are provided:

ONNX fp16 (68 MB): portable, runs anywhere via ONNX Runtime (Android / iOS / web / server); numerically identical to the PyTorch model.
ONNX 4-bit (22 MB): weight-only block quantization (MatMulNBits + GatherBlockQuantized) of the Linear layers and the embedding table. Needs ONNX Runtime ≥ 1.18 for the 4-bit ops; 99.8% token-faithful to fp16.
Core ML, 4-bit palettized (17 MB): weight-only k-means palettization for the Apple Neural Engine (iOS 18 / macOS 15+). Palettization is effectively lossless here (Δ strict F1 = −0.0002 vs fp16).

It emits the same 12 entity types as masker (48 BIOES labels + O) and slots into the same rules-layer pipeline for structured PII.

Usage

For a plain PyTorch / Transformers quick start, the snippet on the masker card runs unchanged, just point it at amsintelligence/masker-mini.

What this repo is actually for is the two on-device builds:

ONNX Runtime (portable for Android, iOS, web, server)

import onnxruntime as ort, numpy as np
from transformers import AutoTokenizer

tok = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("amsintelligence/masker-mini")
sess = ort.InferenceSession("onnx/model_fp16.onnx")
text = "Stuur de factuur naar Sanne de Groot in Utrecht."
feed = {k: v.astype(np.int64) for k, v in tok(text, return_tensors="np").items()}
logits = sess.run(None, feed)[0]        # [1, seq_len, 49] BIOES logits -> argmax + decode

For the smallest portable build, swap in onnx/model_int4.onnx (22 MB, 4-bit) — same inputs/outputs, needs ONNX Runtime ≥ 1.18.

Core ML, add coreml/masker_mini_4bit.mlpackage to an Xcode target.

Inputs input_ids, attention_mask, token_type_ids (Int32, fixed length 256); output logits. The BIOES→span decode is the same handful of lines shown on the masker card.

Evaluation

openpii-1m validation, span-level, boundary-exact. In-distribution — see Limitations. Numbers below are the 4-bit Core ML build (fp16/PyTorch are within ±0.001).

Overall: strict F1 0.965 · typed F1 0.991 · leak-safe recall 0.998. Distillation gap vs the masker teacher (0.982): −0.007.

Per-type strict F1

entity	F1	entity	F1
DATE	0.999	AGE	0.969
EMAIL	0.999	BUILDING_NUMBER	0.969
CREDIT_CARD	0.999	CITY	0.954
PHONE	0.998	STREET_NAME	0.922
GOVERNMENT_ID	0.998	GIVEN_NAME	0.910
ZIP_CODE	0.994	SURNAME	0.900

By language

split	strict F1
English	0.974
Non-English (22 langs, pooled)	0.971
Dutch (flagship)	0.968
Per-language range	0.960 - 0.983

Limitations & biases

This is a compressed model. It trails the full-size masker by ~0.7 strict-F1 points, and the loss is not uniform: it lands almost entirely on GIVEN_NAME / SURNAME, plus CITY / STREET_NAME from the reduced 64K vocabulary. Structured types (email, phone, IDs, cards, dates) stay ≥ 0.99. The one language-specific soft spot is Dutch person-name boundaries (tussenvoegsels). If you need the top half-point back, use masker.
Scores are in-distribution (synthetic openpii), treat them as an upper bound, measure on your own text, and design for residual leakage rather than assuming full coverage.

Credits & attribution

Distilled from masker, which is itself a derivative of:

Backbone / tokenizer lineage: microsoft/mdeberta-v3-base by Microsoft; MIT License (masker-mini reuses mDeBERTa's SentencePiece tokenizer). DeBERTaV3: He, Gao & Chen, 2021 (arXiv:2111.09543).
Training data: ai4privacy/pii-masking-openpii-1m by Ai4Privacy; CC-BY-4.0. Attribution required; please retain this credit in downstream use.

License

Licensed under the Offchain Studio Source License, Version 1.0, a source-available license. Full terms: https://ai.basement.dev/license.

Commercial-license requests: licensing@basement.dev.

The underlying components keep their own (attribution-only) terms, retained in Credits above: the mDeBERTa lineage is MIT and the openpii training data is CC-BY-4.0.

Citation

@software{masker_mini,
  title  = {masker-mini: on-device PII detection for 23 European languages},
  year   = {2026},
  note   = {6-layer distillation of masker (mDeBERTa-v3); ONNX + Core ML},
  url    = {https://huggingface.co/amsintelligence/masker-mini}
}