Short bio
I am an Assistant Professor (moving to Associate with tenure in July 2026) 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 161 (undergraduate Algorithms) in the Winter.
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
[Apr 2026]: I have officially been granted tenure!
[Apr 2026]: New paper on the complexity of second-order stationary points in constrained optimization.
[Feb 2026]: My first paper (AI for Math) in collaboration with Google (leading by David Woodruff and Vahab Mirrokni) and many universities. You can find a blog post posted by Google DeepMind. Special thanks to Simina Branzei and Dimitris Paparas!
[Jan 2026]: Our EC23 paper got accepted in Games and Economic Behavior.
[Jan 2026]: New paper on Performative prediction.
[Jan 2026]: New paper on lower bounds of no-regret in potential games.
[Jan 2026]: Two papers accepted in ICLR 2026 (Congrats Rohan!).
[Jan 2026]: Three papers accepted in AISTATS 2026.
Older news
[Sep 2025]: Very excited about the first paper of my student Rohan. Comments are welcome!
[Sep 2025]: Three papers accepted in NeurIPS 2025, one spotlight.
[Jul 2025]: Invited talk at workshop on Algorithmic Game Theory.
[Apr 2025]: Received an NSF grant award from AF.
[Apr 2025]: Invited talk at Learning theory workshop, NTU, Singapore.
[Mar 2025]: Invited talk at UC Santa Cruz, CS department.
[Feb 2025]: New paper on the complexity of min-max.
[Jan 2025]: Invited talk at SUFE and Chinese Academy of Sciences.
[Dec 2024]: Invited talk at SILO, Madison, Wisconsin.
[Sep 2024]: One paper accepted in NeurIPS 2024. Congratulations to my student Jingming for his first publication!
[Sep 2024]: Two papers accepted in WINE 2024.
[Jul 2024]: Invited talk at MARL summer school, EPFL, Switzerland.
[Jul 2024]: I am co-organizing a workshop on the foundations of modern AI, NTUA, Greece.
[Jun 2024]: Invited talk at GAIMSS, Metz, France.
[Jun 2024]: I'm co-organizing the EC 2024 Mentoring Workshop with Simina Branzei.
[May 2024]: One paper accepted in ICML 2024.
[Apr 2024]: One paper accepted in UAI 2024.
[Mar 2024]: Talks at 2024 Informs Optimization Society Conference (IOS24)
[Jan 2024]: New paper on bandit feedback in congestion games.
[Jan 2024]: PC member for FOCS 2024, AC for ICML, NeurIPS 2024.
[Jan 2024]: Two papers accepted in ICLR 2024.
[Jan 2024]: Two papers accepted in AAAI 2024.
[Nov 2023]: Talk at Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute on learning in two player games.
[Oct 2023]: Talk at Informs on Markov polymatrix Games.
[Oct 2023]: AC for ICLR 2024, AISTATS 2024.
[Sept 2023]: Four papers accepted in NeurIPS 2023.
[Jun 2023]: I'm co-organizing the EC 2023 Mentoring Workshop with Simina Branzei.
[May 2023]: One paper accepted in EC 2023.
[Apr 2023]: One paper accepted in ICML 2023 as oral.
[Mar 2023]: Talk on computing Nash equilibria in Markov Games.
[Feb 2023]: New paper on time-varying games.
[Jan 2023]: Two papers accepted in ICLR 2023, one oral.
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)
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 (PhD, MSc, chronological order)
Sai Ganesh Nagarajan (PhD ‘21 → Assistant Professor at SDU)
Stelios Stavroulakis (PhD ‘25 → Senior RL Researcher at Quilter)
Will Overman (MSc ‘22 → PhD at Stanford)
Fivos Kalogiannis (MSc ‘24 → PhD at UCSD)
Committees and Organizing Workshops
PC member for FOCS 2024
SPC member for EC 2025
Area Chair at NeurIPS 2024, 2025
Area Chair at ICML 2024, 2025, 2026
Area Chair at ICLR 2024, 2025, 2026
Senior PC at AAAI 2025, 2026
Area Chair at AISTATS 2024, 2025, 2026
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