Airbnb's research demonstrates how to bridge the gap between academic theory and production-scale systems. By using bimodal embeddings and specialized ranking metrics, they solve complex marketplace challenges, providing a blueprint for driving revenue through advanced machine learning.
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.
KDD is a flagship conference in data science research. Hosted annually by a special interest group of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), it’s where researchers learn about some of the most groundbreaking developments in data mining, knowledge discovery, and large-scale data analytics, which are critical to Airbnb’s efforts to improve core products like search and recommendations.
Our participation
We’ve been presenting at KDD since 2018, and 2025 was another strong year for us. We received multiple contributions across the applied data science track and workshops, which were well-received by the broader community and even inspired us to consider open-sourcing some of our technology. We were also inspired by the related research in this area and are eager to explore these methods through new collaborations.
Research highlights
Link to all papers
CIKM is a premier forum for discussing and presenting research at the intersection of information and knowledge management, including topics like AI, data mining, database systems, and information retrieval. Many of these topics directly intersect with our core product challenges, such as search, ranking, and recommendations.
Our participation
At CIKM 2025, Airbnb’s Relevance and Personalization team had five peer-reviewed papers accepted for publication, building on our participation in 2023 and 2024. These papers focused on advanced AI/ML techniques for search and recommendations, and sharing real-world insights from using these technologies at Airbnb’s scale. Industry and academic researchers, especially those working on two-sided marketplaces, engaged with our work and provided valuable feedback.
Research highlights
EMNLP is a top-tier NLP conference that brings together practitioners and researchers to discuss new architectures and training strategies for language models, safety and evaluation strategies for LLMs, and real-world NLP applications. These research areas directly intersect with many of Airbnb’s product surfaces, such as customer support, search & discovery, and trust & safety. Additionally, each EMNLP cycle includes the release of new datasets, evaluation suites, and open-source libraries to help teams benchmark their progress against community standards.
Our participation
In 2025, we sponsored EMNLP and presented two papers on humans-in-the-loop in AI systems and advanced summarization techniques. We also used EMNLP’s community datasets to benchmark our system, which showcased where we excel and where we can build upon our success with additional best practices. The conference deepened academic collaborations through discussions on LLM evaluation, safety, and agentic AI design, including mentoring students and early-career researchers.
Research highlights
COLING is a top-tier NLP conference that covers both foundational research and industry applications of language models, including reasoning, evaluation, multilingual NLP, and real-world LLM systems. The work presented at this conference helps validate Airbnb’s technical direction and directly informs future investments.
Our participation
In 2025, Airbnb presented at COLING for the first time, sharing a paper titled “LLM-Friendly Knowledge Representation for Customer Support” by Hanchen Su, Wei Luo, Wei Han, Yu Elaine Liu, Yufeng Wayne Zhang, Cen Mia Zhao, Ying Joy Zhang, and Yashar Mehdad. The paper presents a new format, Intent, Context, and Action (ICA), for structuring business knowledge in LLM-based QA and customer support workflows. Initial experiments in production show promising results. We also discovered relevant research in knowledge retrieval, LLM evaluation, and hallucination detection that will inspire future projects.
MIT CODE is one of the premier venues for researchers and practitioners to discuss topics in online digital experimentation, causal inference, and data-driven product innovation. The conference supports our commitment to data-driven decision-making and using experimentation to understand the long-term impacts on guests, hosts, and marketplace health.
Our participation
In 2025, we had another strong showing at CODE, with a cohort of 6 data scientists and 3 academic collaborators. We gave talks in two sessions and presented a poster, which led to meaningful discussions with peer companies and interest in collaborating with academic research groups.
Research highlights
Link to all papers
INFORMS brings together academics and industry professionals to discuss and share research across data science, machine learning, economics, behavioral science, and analytics.
Our participation
In 2025, our data science team was invited to INFORMS to present two talks in a session about bridging the gap between statistical methods and industry applications.
Research highlights
Link to all papers
The LION conference is a premier gathering of researchers exploring the intersection of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and mathematical optimization.
Our participation
While Airbnb has attended LION in the past, 2025 was the first time we presented at the conference. Nathan Brixius presented “Optimal Matched Block Design For Multi-Arm
Experiments,” which introduces a new optimization formula using mixed-integer programming (MIP) to group subjects in multi-armed experiments, leading to more balanced groups and, in turn, more accurate experimental results. We also connected with leading experts in metaheuristics and AI fairness to help shape our future roadmap and sponsored the awards for the best papers presented at the conference.
The VLDB Conference is one of the top 2 flagship conferences in data management and large-scale data systems, with over 1,500 researchers and practitioners attending.
Our participation
“In 2025, we published our first paper at VLDB: ‘SQL:Trek Automated Index Design at Airbnb’ by Sam Lightstone and Ping Wang. The paper presents a novel approach for automated index design (code-named SQL:Trek). It uses query compiler cost models to identify effective indexes across many relational databases, including most MySQL and PostgreSQL derivatives. Additionally, the Airbnb team attended sessions on system efficiency, graph computing, and AI databases, and had the opportunity to meet other researchers.
Conferences remain a big part of our research program at Airbnb, helping us validate and refine our ideas through community feedback and providing a forum to share real-world insights that advance the field. In 2025, we doubled down on this vision by publishing papers for the first time at conferences in domains such as NLP, optimization, causal inference, and data systems, reflecting our ongoing commitment to using these technologies to create the best possible travel experiences.
As we look to 2026, we’re eager to expand our presence at these conferences and discover new ways to use AI, machine learning, and data science to build a best-in-class travel and living platform. If you’re interested in doing this type of work with us, consider joining us. Apply for one of our open positions.
Academic Publications & Airbnb Tech: 2025 Year in Review was originally published in The Airbnb Tech Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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