Token Is All You Need: Cognitive Planning through Belief-Intent Co-Evolution

The recent study titled 'Token Is All You Need: Cognitive Planning through Belief-Intent Co-Evolution' presents a paradigm shift in autonomous driving technology by suggesting that exhaustive scene modeling is not necessary for high-performance end-to-end autonomous driving (E2EAD). Instead, the research emphasizes the importance of a minimal set of semantically rich tokens that facilitate the co-evolution of belief and intent. Conducted on the nuPlan benchmark, which includes 720 scenarios and over 11,000 samples, the study revealed that using sparse intent tokens alone achieved a strong performance with an average distance error (ADE) of 0.487 meters. Furthermore, when trajectory decoding was conditioned on predicted future tokens, the ADE improved to 0.382 meters, marking a 21.6% enhancement. This indicates that cognitive planning, rather than detailed scene reconstruction, is key to effective autonomous driving. The findings also highlight the emergence of cognitive consistency, wh…