• Academic Publications & Airbnb Tech: 2025 Year in Review 2025 was a big year for research at Airbnb, as we made significant progress toward our mission to use AI, data science, and machine learning to become the best travel and living platform. • Specifically, we doubled down on our presence at long-standing venues like KDD and CIKM - two of the most selective conferences in machine learning. • At the same time, we expanded our research footprint by sharing our work in NLP, optimization, and measurement science at conferences such as COLING, LION, and VLDB. • Across these conferences, Airbnb researchers engaged directly with academic and industry peers by publishing and presenting papers, learning about the latest innovations, launching new collaborations, and mentoring emerging researchers. • In this blog post, we’ll recap the conferences and key papers we presented in 2025, organized by research themes. • Applied machine learning for search, ranking, and personalization KDD (Knowledge and Data Mining) KDD is a flagship conference in data science research.

Article Summaries:

  • In 2025, Airbnb intensified its research presence at top AI and data‑science conferences, notably KDD and CIKM, while broadening its footprint to COLING, LION, and VLDB. The company showcased applied machine‑learning work on search, ranking, and personalization, publishing papers on rapid pre‑A/B evaluation using interleaving and counterfactual methods, and on high‑precision audience expansion via extreme classification for location retrieval. Presentations spurred new collaborations, mentorship of emerging researchers, and discussions about open‑sourcing key technologies. The year’s activities underscored Airbnb’s commitment to leveraging AI, data science, and machine learning to enhance its travel and living platform.

Sources: