PRvL: Quantifying the Capabilities and Risks of Large Language Models for PII Redaction

TL;DR

This paper evaluates how different large language model architectures and training strategies perform in the task of redacting personally identifiable information from text, aiming to improve privacy, accuracy, and efficiency.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of LLMs for PII redaction, introduces PRvL, an open-source suite of fine-tuned models and tools, and offers practical guidance for deploying privacy-preserving redaction systems.

Findings

LLMs can effectively redact PII with proper configuration.

Trade-offs exist between redaction accuracy, semantic preservation, and computational cost.

PRvL enables customizable, privacy-aware PII redaction in secure environments.

Abstract

Redacting Personally Identifiable Information (PII) from unstructured text is critical for ensuring data privacy in regulated domains. While earlier approaches have relied on rule-based systems and domain-specific Named Entity Recognition (NER) models, these methods fail to generalize across formats and contexts. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising alternative, yet the effect of architectural and training choices on redaction performance remains underexplored. LLMs have demonstrated strong performance in tasks that require contextual language understanding, including the redaction of PII in free-form text. Prior work suggests that with appropriate adaptation, LLMs can become effective contextual privacy learners. However, the consequences of architectural and training choices for PII Redaction remain underexplored. In this work, we present a comprehensive analysis of LLMs as privacy-preserving PII Redaction systems. We evaluate a range of LLM architectures and training strategies for their effectiveness in PII Redaction. Our analysis measures redaction performance, semantic preservation, and PII leakage, and compares these outcomes against latency and computational cost. The results provide practical guidance for configuring LLM-based redactors that are accurate, efficient, and privacy-aware. To support reproducibility and real-world deployment, we release PRvL, an open-source suite of fine-tuned models, and evaluation tools for general-purpose PII Redaction. PRvL is built entirely on open-source LLMs and supports multiple inference settings for flexibility and compliance. It is designed to be easily customized for different domains and fully operable within secure, self-managed environments. This enables data owners to perform redactions without relying on third-party services or exposing sensitive content beyond their own infrastructure.