Lillian Ratliff

Lillian Ratliff is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Washington, holding additional Adjunct Associate Professor positions in the Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering and the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. She specializes in research at the intersection of game theory, optimization, machine learning, and control theory, with a focus on decision-making in intelligent systems with learning-enabled components and strategic agents.

Her research interests span game theory and economics, optimization, machine learning, and control theory. She develops theoretical frameworks for understanding how intelligent systems make decisions when interacting with strategic agents. Her work bridges theoretical foundations with practical applications in multi-agent learning systems, where she examines how learning algorithms converge to equilibria in strategic environments. She has made significant contributions to understanding the dynamics of gradient-based learning in games, Stackelberg games, and decision-dependent distributions.

Her recent publications demonstrate a strong focus on theoretical foundations of game-theoretic learning, with particular attention to convergence properties, equilibrium analysis, and strategic behavior in multi-agent systems. Her work spans zero-sum games, matrix games, Stackelberg games, and decision-dependent learning scenarios, with applications across multiple domains including human-machine interaction and networked systems.

• NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (2009)
• NSF CISE Research Initiation Initiative award (2017)
• NSF CAREER award (2019)
• ONR Young Investigator award (2020)
• UW CoE Junior Faculty Award (2021)
• Invited speaker at NAE China-America Frontiers of Engineering Symposium (2019)
• Dhanani Endowed Faculty Fellowship (2020)

Professor Ratliff's research is supported by multiple NSF grants (current: CNS-1736582, CNS-1836819, CNS-1931718, CNS-1907907, CNS-1844729, CNS-1952011; previous: CNS-1634136, CNS-1646912, CNS-1656873) and an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator award. She has mentored numerous students and collaborators across her extensive publication record, with work appearing in top venues including NeurIPS, ICML, AISTATS, and IEEE conferences.