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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10896 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10896/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [FinBERT: Financial Sentiment Analysis with Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10063/) (2019)
- [TabLLM: Few-shot Classification of Tabular Data with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10723/) (2022)
- [PIXIU: A Large Language Model, Instruction Data and Evaluation Benchmark for Finance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05443/) (2023)
- [FinBERT: A Pretrained Language Model for Financial Communications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08097/) (2020)
- [InvestLM: A Large Language Model for Investment using Financial Domain Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13064/) (2023)
- [Predicting Distresses using Deep Learning of Text Segments in Annual Reports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.05270/) (2018)
- [Benchmarking Machine Learning Models to Predict Corporate Bankruptcy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.12051/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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 F1-score and ROC-AUC. In contrast, Llama-3-8B trails gradient boosting on ROC-AUC at every horizon and is generally weaker on F1-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.