PrivacyFilter.Net

A managed C# port of the inference API and decoding pipeline from OpenAI Privacy Filter. It uses the official ONNX model, Microsoft.ML.Tokenizers for byte-compatible o200k_base tokenization, and managed constrained BIOES Viterbi decoding, span reconstruction, and redaction.

Unofficial. This project is not affiliated with or endorsed by OpenAI.

Features

• Loads the official fp32, fp16, q4, q4f16, or quantized ONNX checkpoints.
• Uses Microsoft.ML.Tokenizers for o200k_base token ids and per-token character offsets.
• Reproduces the upstream 33-label BIOES space and constrained Viterbi decoder.
• Supports typed placeholders such as <PRIVATE_PERSON> or a single <REDACTED> output mode.
• Processes long inputs in non-overlapping token windows, matching the upstream CPU runtime default of 4,096 tokens.
• Returns the upstream schema fields and JSON names.

Usage

Download an ONNX variant and its metadata from openai/privacy-filter. Keep the ONNX external-data file beside its .onnx graph:

privacy-filter/
  config.json
  viterbi_calibration.json
  onnx/
    model_q4f16.onnx
    model_q4f16.onnx_data

For a smaller CPU checkpoint:

hf download openai/privacy-filter `
  --revision 7ffa9a043d54d1be65afb281eddf0ffbe629385b `
  --include config.json viterbi_calibration.json onnx/model_q4f16.onnx onnx/model_q4f16.onnx_data `
  --local-dir C:\models\privacy-filter

using PrivacyFilterNet;

using var filter = PrivacyFilter.Load(@"C:\models\privacy-filter");
PrivacyFilterResult result =
    filter.Redact("Alice's email is alice@example.com.");

Console.WriteLine(result.RedactedText);
foreach (PrivacyFilterSpan span in result.DetectedSpans)
{
    Console.WriteLine($"{span.Label}: {span.Text} [{span.Start}, {span.End})");
}

To collapse all detected types:

using var filter = PrivacyFilter.Load(
    @"C:\models\privacy-filter",
    new PrivacyFilterOptions
    {
        OutputMode = PrivacyFilterOutputMode.Redacted,
    });

The loader prefers model_q4f16.onnx, then the quantized, q4, fp16, and fp32 variants. Set ModelFileName to choose one explicitly. ONNX Runtime is a native runtime dependency; tokenization and all post-model decoding are managed C#.

Scope

PrivacyFilter.Net ports inference and redaction. Training, fine-tuning, and the PyTorch/Triton sparse-MoE implementation are out of scope because OpenAI publishes official ONNX graphs that preserve the model architecture directly.

Building and testing

dotnet build PrivacyFilter.Net.sln -c Release
dotnet test PrivacyFilter.Net.sln -c Release

Tests validate tokenizer ids, decoded text, and offsets against Python tiktoken across deterministic Unicode and special-token corpora; compare Viterbi paths and BIOES span reconstruction against committed Python oracles; and run the complete pipeline through a tiny ONNX fixture with the same input/output contract as the official model.

Benchmarks

Set PRIVACY_FILTER_MODEL_DIR to a downloaded checkpoint, then run:

dotnet run -c Release --project bench\PrivacyFilter.Net.Benchmarks

The BenchmarkDotNet suite measures short single-record inference and a longer multi-record input while reporting managed allocations. Current measurements and the upstream Python comparison are in bench/results.md.

License

Apache-2.0. See LICENSE and THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.