A distilled 3-layer DeBERTa-v3-small model for detecting Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in text. Designed for low-latency production inference in pure Rust — no ONNX, no Python, no C++ dependencies at runtime.
This is a custom architecture — not GLiNER. The DeBERTa backbone is initialized from urchade/gliner_small-v2.1 (layers {0, 2, 4}), but the detection head (Conv1D + CrossAttention + GlobalPointer) is our own design, trained end-to-end with supervised NER loss.
Key Design Choices
Conv1D replaces BiLSTM: parallelizable, single GEMM instead of sequential ops
GlobalPointer replaces SpanMarker: additive start/end scoring, simpler and faster