Short bio
I am an Assistant Professor in the department of Computer Science, in the Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Science at UC Irvine and the director of the GOALLab. I am affiliated with the Center for Algorithms and Theory of Computation, the Center for Machine Learning and Intelligent Systems (CML) and the Algorithms, Combinatorics and Optimization Center (ACO). I am also affiliated with Archimedes research unit. Prior to UCI, I was an Assistant Professor in Information Systems at SUTD. Before that I was a MIT Postdoctoral Fellow working with Costis Daskalakis. I obtained my PhD in Algorithms, Combinatorics, and Optimization (ACO) at Georgia Tech, advised by Prasad Tetali. At Georgia Tech, I also obtained a MSc in Mathematics. I did my undergrad studies in National Technical University of Athens. Here you can find my CV, Google Scholar and DBLP profiles. My research has been supported by NRF for AI (while at SUTD) and NSF awards.
Interests
I am interested in theory of computation and its interface with online learning in games, optimization (convex, non-convex, min-max), dynamical systems, probability and statistics and their applications to multi-agent Reinforcement Learning.
Teaching
I teach CS 280 (Algorithmic Game Theory) in the Fall.
For courses I have taught see here.
Selected Publications
Click here for full list
Semi Bandit dynamics in Congestion Games: Convergence to Nash Equilibrium and No-Regret. ICML 2023 (oral)
Efficiently Computing Nash Equilibria in Adversarial Team Markov Games. ICLR 2023 (oral)
Global Convergence of Multi-Agent Policy Gradient in Markov Potential Games. ICLR 2022
Regression from Dependent Observations. STOC 2019
First-order Methods Almost Always Avoid Saddle Points. Math. Programming 2019.
The Limit Points of (Optimistic) Gradient Descent in Min-Max Optimization. NeurIPS 2018
Multiplicative Weights Update with Constant step-size in Congestion Games: Convergence, Limit Cycles and Chaos. NeurIPS 2017 (spotlight)
News
Older news
Talks
The complexity of symmetric min-max
Learning in Bimatrix Games (MSRI talk)
Nash equilibria in Markov Games
Policy Gradient for Markov Potential Games
On first-order methods (UCI ML seminar)
Depth-width tradeoffs for NNs (MiFODS - MIT)
Students
Current Students (chronological order)
Nikolas Patris (Fall 2022 - Present)
Stelios Stavroulakis (Fall 2022 - Present)
Jingming Yan (Fall 2023 - Present)
Andreas Kontogiannis (Archimedes, co-advised with A. Pagourtzis)
Vasilis Pollatos (Archimedes, co-advised with P. Mertikopoulos)
Rohan Chauhan (Fall 2024 - Present)
Parnian Shahkar (Spring 2025 - Present)
Past Students (chronological order)
Sai Ganesh Nagarajan (PhD ‘21, now Assistant Professor at SDU)
Will Overman (MSc ‘22, now PhD at Stanford)
Fivos Kalogiannis (MSc ‘24, now PhD at UCSD)
Committees and Organizing Workshops
PC member for FOCS 2024
SPC member for EC 2025
Area Chair at NeurIPS 2024
Area Chair at ICML 2024, 2025
Area Chair at ICLR 2024, 2025
Senior PC at AAAI 2025
Area Chair at AISTATS 2024, 2025
PC member for EC 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023
PC member for WINE 2019, 2021, 2023, 2024
Organizer of EC Mentoring Workshop 2023 and 2024