Shishen Lin (林仕燊)

University of Warwick

Gibbet Hill Road

Coventry, UK

CV4 7AL

I joined the University of Warwick as a Research Fellow in 2025, contributing to the ERC Synergy project OCEAN (On intelligenCE And Networks – Synergistic research in Bayesian Statistics, Microeconomics and Computer Sciences). The project is led by Professors Eric Moulines (École Polytechnique), Michael I. Jordan (UC Berkeley & INRIA), Christian Robert (Université Paris-Dauphine) and Gareth Roberts (University of Warwick). I work closely with Professor Gareth Roberts and Professor Adam Johansen.

Since Sep. 2021, I have been a PhD student in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham, working on the UKRI Turing AI Acceleration Fellowship project “Rigorous Time-Complexity Analysis of Coevolutionary Algorithms” (project page), led by Professor Per Kristian Lehre, who also supervises my PhD. During my PhD, I also visited Professor Chao Qian at LAMDA Lab, Nanjing University, China.

My research mainly focuses on Artificial Intelligence, Optimisation, Evolutionary Algorithm. I am interested in reinforcement learning and the combination with evolutionary computation methods.

Before my PhD, I completed an MSc in Mathematics at Imperial College London concentrating on probability theory, Markov processes and random matrix theory, after earning a BSc in Mathematics at Warwick.

Me? Mathematician? Computer Scientist? Or both?

Potential URSS Students at Warwick: If you share related interests on stochastic optimisation and reinforcement learning and have a strong background in probability theory and stochastic process, feel free to contact me by email. The URSS link is available here: (project page).

News

Apr 30, 2026	Our paper “Provably Sub-Linear Two-Timescale NeuroEvolution with Online Plasticity” with Yixin Chen has been accepted in IJCAI-ECAI 2026!
Apr 27, 2026	Our paper “A Generic Framework for Optimisation under Uncertainty with Recourse: Theory and Examples” — joint work with Joshua Knowles, Per Kristian Lehre, Frank Neumann, Janina Schreiber, and Christine Zarges — has been accepted in GECCO 2026 (Theory) (San José, Costa Rica, July 13–17, 2026)!
Sep 15, 2025	Joined the Department of Statistics, University of Warwick as a Research Fellow on the ERC Synergy OCEAN project! Excited to collaborate with the team.
Aug 30, 2025	Presented our IJCAI 2025 paper “Randomised Optimism via Competitive Co-Evolution for Matrix Games with Bandit Feedback” in Guangzhou (Aug 28–31, 2025)!
Aug 02, 2025	Attended Symposium at Oxford – 75 years of Nash equilibrium Nash75 !

Selected Publications

IJCAI

Provably Sub-Linear Two-Timescale NeuroEvolution with Online Plasticity

Shishen Lin^*, and Yixin Chen^*

In Proceedings of the 35th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 29th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-ECAI), 2026

Bib

@inproceedings{lin2026ijcai,
  author = {Lin, Shishen and Chen, Yixin},
  title = {Provably Sub-Linear Two-Timescale NeuroEvolution with Online Plasticity},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 35th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 29th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-ECAI)},
  year = {2026},
  is_book = {false},
  is_journal = {false},
  is_conference = {true}
}

IJCAI (Oral)

Randomised Optimism via Competitive Co-Evolution for Matrix Games with Bandit Feedback

Shishen Lin

In Proceedings of the 34th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 2025

Bib

@inproceedings{lin2025ijcai,
  presentation = {Oral},
  author = {Lin, Shishen},
  title = {Randomised Optimism via Competitive Co-Evolution for Matrix Games with Bandit Feedback},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 34th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI)},
  year = {2025},
  address = {Montreal, Canada},
  is_book = {false},
  is_journal = {false},
  is_conference = {true}
}

AAAI (Oral)

Towards Runtime Analysis of Population-Based Co-evolutionary Algorithms on Sparse Binary Zero-Sum Game

(αβ) Per Kristian Lehre, and Shishen Lin

In Proceedings of the 39th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2025

Bib

@inproceedings{lin2025aaai,
  presentation = {Oral},
  author = {Lehre, Per Kristian and Lin, Shishen},
  title = {Towards Runtime Analysis of Population-Based Co-evolutionary Algorithms on Sparse Binary Zero-Sum Game},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 39th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)},
  year = {2025},
  address = {Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA},
  is_book = {false},
  is_journal = {false},
  is_conference = {true},
}

NeurIPS

No Free Lunch Theorem and Black-Box Complexity Analysis for Adversarial Optimisation

(αβ) Per Kristian Lehre, and Shishen Lin

In Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024

Bib

@inproceedings{lin2024neurips,
  author = {Lehre, Per Kristian and Lin, Shishen},
  title = {No Free Lunch Theorem and Black-Box Complexity Analysis for Adversarial Optimisation},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)},
  year = {2024},
  address = {Vancouver, Canada},
  is_book = {false},
  is_journal = {false},
  is_conference = {true},
}

PPSN

Overcoming Binary Adversarial Optimisation with Competitive Coevolution

(αβ) Per Kristian Lehre, and Shishen Lin

In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving From Nature (PPSN), 2024

Bib

@inproceedings{lin2024ppsn,
  author = {Lehre, Per Kristian and Lin, Shishen},
  title = {Overcoming Binary Adversarial Optimisation with Competitive Coevolution},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving From Nature (PPSN)},
  year = {2024},
  address = {Hagenberg, Austria},
  is_book = {false},
  is_journal = {false},
  is_conference = {true},
}