discord-moderation-minilm

A 23 MB INT8 ONNX text classifier for chat moderation, built for edge deployment — it runs on a Raspberry Pi, not just a GPU box.

This is the speed variant of a pair (numbers are in-domain, on held-out data the model never trained on — see Results):

Use this one on a Pi or at very high volume — it flags fewer innocent messages at the default threshold. Use L12 for a lower miss rate. Both are honest generalization numbers; the threshold is a knob (see Thresholding).

Why this exists

Most open toxicity classifiers have two problems for chat moderation:

1. No spam or flood class. They're toxicity-only, so a moderation pipeline has to bolt on a separate heuristic. This model predicts all four classes natively.
2. They over-flag competitive banter. "I'm gonna destroy you in Rocket League" is not a threat, but a model trained on Wikipedia edit-war comments often thinks it is. False positives punish innocent users, and they're the reason moderation bots get uninstalled.

Results

Measured on a held-out test set the model never trained on (excluded from training by construction), split by domain because register matters. Counts are FP/FN, threshold 0.85, INT8 ONNX.

In-domain — chat-register text (Wikipedia/Jigsaw + synthetic chat), what this model is for:

Out-of-domain — real game chat (CONDA, a register this model was NOT trained on):

Game chat is the honest weakness — this model is Wikipedia/Jigsaw-register, not gaming slang. The larger L12 is cleaner on the identity probe (0/592 vs this model's 11/592); at 22M params, L6 has less capacity to fully absorb the debiasing. If identity fairness is critical for your deployment, prefer L12.

Note on prior revisions. Earlier uploads reported ~2.7% FP / 1.9% FN. Those were train-on-test inflated (the eval set overlapped the training data) and the weights carried an identity-term bias. This revision excludes the holdout from training (so the numbers above are real generalization) and applies counterfactual augmentation to cut identity bias to 1.9%.

For scale: general-purpose LLM judges prompted for moderation measured far worse on the same yardsticks at 40–100× the size (phi3:mini, 2.2 GB: F1 ~48 on game chat; llama-guard3:1b: missed ~84% of interpersonal abuse).

Usage

ONNX (recommended — this is the 23 MB path)

from optimum.onnxruntime import ORTModelForSequenceClassification
from transformers import AutoTokenizer, pipeline

REPO = "strictlyinsecure/discord-moderation-minilm"
model = ORTModelForSequenceClassification.from_pretrained(REPO, subfolder="onnx", file_name="model.onnx")
tok = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(REPO)
clf = pipeline("text-classification", model=model, tokenizer=tok, top_k=None, device=-1)

clf("i'm gonna destroy you in rocket league tonight lmao")
# → benign  (0.992)
clf("FREE NITRO for everyone, claim here bit.ly/x9k2")
# → spam    (0.993)
clf("shut up you idiot nobody likes you")
# → abusive (0.991)

Requires pip install optimum[onnxruntime].

PyTorch (fp32)

from transformers import pipeline

clf = pipeline("text-classification", model="strictlyinsecure/discord-moderation-minilm", top_k=None)
clf("FREE NITRO click here bit.ly/x9k2")
# [{'label': 'spam', 'score': 0.99}, ...]

Thresholding

The model is bimodal — it outputs ~0.99 or ~0.003 and little in between. On the held-out set, the trade-off curve is nearly flat between 0.3 and 0.9, so the threshold is not a delicate choice:

Training

• Base: all-MiniLM-L6-v2, 4-class sequence classification head, max_length=200.
• Data: ~35k rows — stratified Jigsaw Toxic Comment Classification (CC0), length-filtered to chat-sized messages, plus synthetic chat-register rows (evasion, sarcasm, spam, flood, hard benign negatives) and counterfactual identity augmentation. CC0 + owned synthetic only — no CONDA (which has no license).
• The held-out test set is excluded from training (a prior revision did not do this, which inflated its reported scores). Numbers above are real generalization.
• Identity-bias fix. Counterfactual augmentation (term-swapping within identity groups + both-polarity templates in contracted and expanded forms) decorrelates identity terms from the label. On L6 this cuts the 592-sentence probe to 11 flagged (1.9%); the larger L12 reaches 0.
• Class-weighted loss (inverse frequency). Without it the model collapses to predicting abusive for everything.
• 70/15/15 split, early stopping on validation macro F1, INT8 dynamic quantization for export (effectively free — the INT8 cost is within measurement noise).

toxicity and harassment are merged into one abusive class. On the labeled corpus, two annotators (Jigsaw's humans and an LLM judge) disagreed about which of those two buckets an abusive message belonged in 48% of the time. That boundary was training noise, not signal, and most moderation pipelines take the same action for both.

Limitations — please read before deploying

• The spam and flood scores are optimistic. Those classes were trained on templated synthetic data, and the evaluation set draws from the same template families. They score ~100% here. Real-world spam is far more varied. Read this as "learned these patterns", not "solved spam".
• Never trained on real chat logs. The training data is Wikipedia comments plus synthetic chat. The register gap is real and measurable — see ToxBuster, which found +57 points of recall from training on actual game chat instead of Wikipedia. Expect degradation on live traffic.
• English only. Slurs and abuse in other languages will likely be missed.
• Evasion is only lightly covered. Leetspeak, unicode homoglyphs and spaced-out letters appear in training, but only from a synthetic generator — a determined evader will get through.
• Evaluated on the author's own held-out split, not a public benchmark. Numbers are not directly comparable to models evaluated elsewhere.

Intended use

A fast first-pass filter in a moderation pipeline — cheap enough to run on every message, with a human or a stronger model handling escalation. It is not a substitute for human moderators, and it should not be the sole basis for automated bans.

License & attribution

Apache-2.0. See NOTICE for the attribution required on redistribution.

Trained on the Jigsaw Toxic Comment Classification dataset (CC0). The underlying comment text originates from Wikipedia and is licensed CC-BY-SA-3.0.

Base model sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2 is Apache-2.0.