ASIRF: An Agentic Framework for Context-Dependent Sensitive Information Redaction

Sensitive information is defined by domain and intent, not a universal category, yet redaction systems such as privacy filters and named-entity recognizers fix a taxonomy at training time, requiring retraining for each new domain. We introduce ASIRF (Agentic Sensitive Information Redaction Framework), which retrieves domain-specific definitions based on the input’s domain from a flexible knowledge base at inference time, needing no retraining to adapt. Two architectures, a three- call multi-agent pipeline and a single-agent variant, are evaluated across ten small open-weight models and eight datasets, including out-of-distribution fictional domains, against the OpenAI Privacy Filter (OPF) as a trained-classifier baseline. With only a few dozen expert-authored definitions per domain and no training data, ASIRF’s recall exceeds OPF’s in 68 of 80 model–domain combinations (85%), by at least one of the two architectures, with shortfalls confined mostly to OPF’s training-distribution domains.