Rushit N. Shah

PhD, Computer Science · University of Illinois, Chicago

I work on problems in imitation learning, reinforcement learning, and optimization.

My dissertation introduced a satisficing perspective on imitation learning, using subdominance minimization as a unified objective for learning acceptable behavior from suboptimal demonstrations.

I have also worked on fault detection algorithms for aerospace systems.

News

Mar 2026	Defended dissertation. PhD done.
Dec 2025	NeurIPS 2025 Spotlight — imitation beyond expectation via stochastic dominance.
Jul 2025	IJCAI 2025 — imitation learning via focused satisficing.
May 2025	Software Engineering Intern at Waymo.

Experience

Waymo — Mountain View, CA

Software Engineering Intern · May – Aug 2025

University of Illinois at Chicago

Graduate Research Assistant · Jan 2022 – 2026

iManage — Chicago, IL

Data Science Intern (NLP) · May – Aug 2021

University of Illinois at Chicago

Graduate Teaching Assistant · Aug 2018 – Jan 2022

Publications

Ali Farajzadeh, Danyal Saeed, Syed M. Abbas, Rushit N. Shah, Aadirupa Saha, Brian D. Ziebart. Imitation Beyond Expectation Using Pluralistic Stochastic Dominance. NeurIPS, 2025. ★ Spotlight

Rushit N. Shah, Nikolaos Agadakos, Synthia Sasulski, Ali Farajzadeh, Sanjiban Chodhury, Brian D. Ziebart. Imitation Learning via Focused Satisficing. IJCAI, 2025.

Rushit N. Shah, Nikolaos Agadakos, Synthia Sasulski, Ali Farajzadeh, Sanjiban Chodhury, Brian D. Ziebart. Value-Aligned Imitation via Focused Satisficing. NeurIPS Workshop on Pluralistic Alignment, 2024.

Rushit N. Shah, Brian D. Ziebart. Minimally Subdominant Decision Transformer. AAAI Spring Symposium, 2024.

Srivastava, Saket, Rushit N. Shah, Catalin Teodoriu, Aditya Sharma. Impact of data quality on supervised machine learning: Case study on drilling vibrations. Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering, 2022.

Srivastava, Saket, Rushit N. Shah, Catalin Teodoriu. Natural Language Processing Based Information Extraction from Drilling Reports to Classify Drilling Dysfunction Severity. Geothermal Resources Council Transactions, 2022.

Rushit N. Shah, Varun Khemani, Michael H. Azarian, Michael G. Pecht, Y. Su. Analyzing data complexity using metafeatures for classification algorithm selection. 2018.

Rushit N. Shah. Fault Detection Framework for Imbalanced and Sparsely-Labeled Data Sets Using Self-Organizing Maps [M.S. Thesis]. 2018.

Rushit N. Shah, Michael H. Azarian, Michael G. Pecht. Fault Detection in Bearings Using Autocorrelation. 2017.

Interests

I train for triathlons (swim, bike, run) and have loved living in Chicago.

I love cats (and all animals, in general), am an aviation geek, cook a lot, and dabble in music.

Contact

rushitnshah at gmail dot com