Cognitive-Hierarchy Guided End-to-End Planning for Autonomous Driving

TL;DR

CogAD is a hierarchical, cognitively-inspired end-to-end autonomous driving model that improves perception, planning robustness, and trajectory diversity, achieving state-of-the-art results in complex real-world scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a novel hierarchical cognition-inspired framework for perception and planning in autonomous driving, aligning more closely with human cognitive processes.

Findings

State-of-the-art performance on nuScenes and Bench2Drive datasets.

Superior handling of long-tail and complex driving scenarios.

Enhanced environmental understanding and trajectory diversity.

Abstract

While end-to-end autonomous driving has advanced significantly, prevailing methods remain fundamentally misaligned with human cognitive principles in both perception and planning. In this paper, we propose CogAD, a novel end-to-end autonomous driving model that emulates the hierarchical cognition mechanisms of human drivers. CogAD implements dual hierarchical mechanisms: global-to-local context processing for human-like perception and intent-conditioned multi-mode trajectory generation for cognitively-inspired planning. The proposed method demonstrates three principal advantages: comprehensive environmental understanding through hierarchical perception, robust planning exploration enabled by multi-level planning, and diverse yet reasonable multi-modal trajectory generation facilitated by dual-level uncertainty modeling. Extensive experiments on nuScenes and Bench2Drive demonstrate that CogAD achieves state-of-the-art performance in end-to-end planning, exhibiting particular superiority in long-tail scenarios and robust generalization to complex real-world driving conditions.