CogAD: Cognitive-Hierarchy Guided End-to-End Autonomous Driving
This work addresses the problem of improving autonomous driving systems for real-world applications by incorporating human-like cognitive hierarchies, representing an incremental advancement over existing methods.
The paper tackles the misalignment of end-to-end autonomous driving methods with human cognitive principles by proposing CogAD, which emulates hierarchical cognition for perception and planning, achieving state-of-the-art performance in end-to-end planning on nuScenes and Bench2Drive datasets.
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.