Contact:

About:

I am a postdoctoral researcher at SUTD in Singapore working with Georgios Piliouras and Antonios Varvitsiotis. I received my PhD in computer science at Yale in May 2024, where I was advised by James Aspnes. Previously, I was also a visitor at IST Austria in 2023 and summer 2024, where I was hosted by Dan Alistarh and Krish Chatterjee.

My research interests are at the intersection of online learning, optimization, and algorithmic game theory. My current and recent work has focused on developing principled theoretical foundations for solving online learning tasks, particularly in multi-agent settings.

News:

• December 2025: attending NeurIPS in San Diego.
• September 2025: along with Anas Barakat and Joseph Sakos, designing and teaching a new graduate-level course on online learning and learning in games at SUTD.
• June/July 2025: visited Aarhus University, attended COLT, and visited Kings College London.
• March 2025: attended OIST Maching Learning Workshop in Okinawa, Japan.
• September 2024: started as a postdoctoral research fellow at SUTD in Singapore.
• June 2024: attended PODC in Nantes, and the GAIMSS summer school and workshop in Metz.
• April/May 2024: successfully defended my PhD and graduated from Yale.
• Winter/Spring/Summer 2023: visited IST Austria, hosted by Dan Alistarh.
• Summer 2022: interned with the privacy-preserving machine learning research group at Meta in NYC, where I collaborated with Sen Yuan and Huanyu Zhang.

Preprints:

• Anas Barakat, John Lazarsfeld, Georgios Piliouras, and Antonios Varvitsiotis
  Online Multi-Agent Control with Adversarial Disturbances
  May 2025 -- preprint
  [ArXiv]
• Anas Barakat, Wayne Lin, John Lazarsfeld, and Antonios Varvitsiotis
  Optimistic Online Learning in Symmetric Cone Games
  March 2025 -- preprint
  [ArXiv]

Publications:

• John Lazarsfeld, Georgios Piliouras, Ryann Sim, and Stratis Skoulakis
  Optimism Without Regularization: Constant Regret in Zero-Sum Games
  NeurIPS 2025
  [ArXiv]
• John Lazarsfeld, Georgios Piliouras, Ryann Sim, and Andre Wibisono
  Fast and Furious Symmetric Learning in Zero-Sum Games: Gradient Descent as Fictitious Play
  COLT 2025
  [ArXiv] [COLT slides]
• Dan Alistarh, Krishnendu Chatterjee, Mehrdad Karrabi, and John Lazarsfeld
  Game Dynamics and Equilibrium Computation in the Population Protocol Model
  PODC 2024
  [ArXiv]
• John Lazarsfeld and Dan Alistarh
  Simple Opinion Dynamics for No-Regret Learning
  OPT workshop @ NeurIPS 2023
  [ArXiv]
• Talley Amir, James Aspnes, Petra Berenbrink, Felix Biermeier, Christopher Hahn, Dominik Kaaser, and John Lazarsfeld
  Fast Convergence of k-Opinion Undecided State Dynamics in the Population Protocol Model
  PODC 2023
  [ArXiv] [Proceedings]
• John Lazarsfeld, Aaron Johnson, and Emmanuel Adeniran
  Differentially Private Maximal Information Coefficients
  ICML 2022
  [ArXiv] [Proceedings]
• John Lazarsfeld and Aaron Johnson
  Consistency of the Maximal Information Coefficient Estimator
  Technical Report, July 2021
  Corrects an error in previous work of Reshef et al. (JMLR, 2016)
  [ArXiv]
• Talley Amir, James Aspnes, and John Lazarsfeld
  Approximate Majority With Catalytic Inputs
  OPODIS 2020
  [ArXiv] [Proceedings]
• John Lazarsfeld, Jonathan Rodríguez, Mert Erden, Yuelin Liu, and Lenore Cowen
  Majority Vote Cascading: A Semi-Supervised Framework for Improving Protein Function Prediction
  ACM BCB 2019 - Best Poster Award
  [Conf. Proceedings] [Code and Data]

Teaching:

• SUTD 40.616: Special Topics in Games, Learning, and Optimization
  Co-designer and co-instructor
  Course website and notes: learning-in-games.github.io
  Fall 2025
• Yale CPSC 569: Randomized Algorithms
  Graduate Teaching Fellow
  Spring 2024
• Yale CPSC 565: Distributed Algorithms
  Graduate Teaching Fellow
  Fall 2023, Fall 2022
• Yale CPSC 365: Introduction to Algorithms
  Graduate Teaching Fellow
  Spring 2022, Spring 2021
• Yale CPSC 202: Mathematical Tools for Computer Science
  Graduate Teaching Fellow
  Fall 2021, Fall 2020
• Tufts COMP 160: Introduction to Algorithms
  Graduate Teaching Assistant
  Spring 2019; Summer 2019

Other/Service: