Academic Publications & Airbnb Tech: 2025 Year in Review

Airbnb recaps its 2025 academic research at KDD, CIKM, and EMNLP covering ML, NLP, and recommendation systems.

• •At KDD, Airbnb shared pre-A/B assessment techniques for search ranking and high-precision location retrieval using categorical cells.
• •At CIKM, five papers covered search augmentation, map-specific NDCG, BiListing bimodal embeddings (text+photo via LLMs), and the Learning-to-Comparison-Shop (LTCS) ranking model.
• •BiListing achieved a 0.425% NDCG booking gain and drove tens of millions in incremental revenue.
• •LTCS yielded 1.7% NDCG and 0.6% booking conversion improvements.
• •At EMNLP, Airbnb presented work on human-in-the-loop LLM systems and summarization for customer support.