V4FinBench: Benchmarking Tabular Foundation Models, LLMs, and Standard Methods on Corporate Bankruptcy Prediction

TL;DR

V4FinBench is a large, realistic benchmark dataset for corporate bankruptcy prediction, enabling evaluation of various models under class imbalance and multi-horizon forecasting.

Contribution

It introduces V4FinBench with over one million records, supporting evaluation of tabular and foundation models in realistic financial distress prediction scenarios.

Findings

TabPFN with imbalance-aware finetuning outperforms gradient boosting at longer horizons.

Llama-3-8B underperforms compared to gradient boosting across horizons.

Finetuning on V4FinBench improves transferability to external datasets.

Abstract

Corporate bankruptcy prediction is a high-stakes financial task characterized by severe class imbalance and multi-horizon forecasting demands. Public datasets supporting it remain scarce and small: widely used free benchmarks contain between 6,000 and 80,000 company-year observations, while larger resources are behind subscription paywalls. To address this gap, we introduce V4FinBench, a benchmark of over one million company-year records from the Visegr\`ad Group (V4) economies (2006-2021), with 131 financial and non-financial features, six prediction horizons, and a composite distress criterion jointly capturing solvency, profitability, and liquidity deterioration. V4FinBench is designed to support the evaluation of tabular and foundation-model methods under realistic class imbalance, with positive rates between 0.19% and 0.36%. We provide reference evaluations of standard tabular baselines, finetuned TabPFN, and QLoRA-finetuned Llama-3-8B. With imbalance-aware finetuning, TabPFN matches or exceeds gradient boosting at longer time horizons on both $F_1$-score and ROC-AUC. In contrast, Llama-3-8B trails gradient boosting on ROC-AUC at every horizon and is generally weaker on $F_1$-score, with the gap widening sharply beyond the immediate horizon. In an external evaluation on the American Bankruptcy Dataset, the V4FinBench-finetuned TabPFN checkpoint improves over vanilla TabPFN, suggesting that adaptation captures transferable financial-distress structure rather than only V4-specific patterns. V4FinBench is publicly released to support further evaluation and development of prediction methods on realistic financial data.