Wiki-Talkie: Multilingual Benchmarking of Persona-Based Agents on Real-World Discussions

arXiv:2610.08513v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLMs are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents in social environments, making it critical to study their ability to faithfully simulate human interactions. Central to this is grounding agents in realistic user personas, yet existing datasets rely on fictional personas and are limited to a handful of languages, lacking the empirical grounding necessary to evaluate behavioral fidelity across diverse populations. We introduce Wiki-Talkie, a multilingual dataset of real-world conversations from Wikipedia Talk pages across five languages spanning two language families: Germanic (German, English) and Romance (Spanish, French, Italian), paired with personas derived from real user communities and encompassing sociodemographic attributes, self-descriptions, and behaviorally grounded interaction traits. Using Wiki-Talkie, we evaluate agent interactional behavior on a next-turn generation task across various persona conditioning strategies. Our evaluation assesses whether agents collectively reproduce the distributional behavioral patterns observed in human discussions. Results show that user's comment history exemplifying interaction behavior consistently outperforms explicit persona information. In addition, models systematically underproduce negative or extreme sentiments, while over producing references and suggestions, revealing biases toward agreeableness and positivity. Crucially, these patterns hold robustly across languages, with small cross-lingual differences.