INCONVENIENT: A Benchmark to Assess LLM Generalization Capabilities from Convenience Samples

Abstract

Machine learning models for tabular prediction typically assume that training data are representative of the population on which they will be deployed. In practice, however, data are often collected based on convenience, availability, or cost, resulting in systematic sampling biases that can distort feature--target relationships and undermine real-world generalization. Existing tabular distribution-shift benchmarks primarily construct out-of-distribution (OOD) settings by partitioning observations across naturally occurring domains. While such partitions may induce changes in P(Y | X), the resulting shifts are neither explicitly controlled nor isolated, and the evaluation distributions themselves are often not representative of the broader target population. We introduce INCONVENIENT, a benchmark designed to study robustness to convenience-sample bias. Rather than relying on naturally occurring domain partitions, INCONVENIENT directly perturbs feature--target relationships in the training distribution while preserving the original population distribution as the deployment environment. This setting more closely reflects real-world scenarios in which models are developed from unrepresentative samples and subsequently deployed on a broader population. The distinction is particularly relevant for large language models (LLMs), whose pretraining may encode population-level knowledge that extends beyond the relationships observed in a biased training dataset. Unlike existing distribution-shift benchmarks, INCONVENIENT provides explicit control over both the direction and severity of relationship shifts, enabling a systematic assessment of robustness to convenience sampling. The benchmark comprises 200 tabular classification and regression datasets spanning diverse application domains and generates around 15,500 shifted training distributions which lead to substantial downstream degradation.