End2Race: Efficient End-to-End Imitation Learning for Real-Time F1Tenth Racing

F1Tenth is a widely adopted reduced-scale platform for developing and testing autonomous racing algorithms, hosting annual competitions worldwide. With high operating speeds, dynamic environments, and head-to-head interactions, autonomous racing requires algorithms that diverge from those in classical autonomous driving. Training such algorithms is particularly challenging: the need for rapid decision-making at high speeds severely limits model capacity. To address this, we propose End2Race, a novel end-to-end imitation learning algorithm designed for head-to-head autonomous racing. End2Race leverages a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) architecture to capture continuous temporal dependencies, enabling both short-term responsiveness and long-term strategic planning. We also adopt a sigmoid-based normalization function that transforms raw LiDAR scans into spatial pressure tokens, facilitating effective model training and convergence. The algorithm is extremely efficient, achieving an inference time of less than 0.5 milliseconds on a consumer-class GPU. Experiments in the F1Tenth simulator demonstrate that End2Race achieves a 94.2% safety rate across 2,400 overtaking scenarios, each with an 8-second time limit, and successfully completes overtakes in 59.2% of cases. This surpasses previous methods and establishes ours as a leading solution for the F1Tenth racing testbed. Code is available at https://github.com/michigan-traffic-lab/End2Race.