Cognitive Dual-Process Planning for Autonomous Driving with Structured Scene Knowledge and Verifiable Reasoning-Action Consistency
High-level planning for autonomous driving is a knowledge-intensive engineering decision task that requires accurate scene understanding, timely inference, and internally consistent action selection. Vision-language models (VLMs) can make intermediate reasoning explicit, but their use in deployed planners is constrained by costly structured supervision, unnecessary reasoning in routine scenes, and possible inconsistencies between generated rationales and driving actions. We present a cognitive dual-process planning framework that represents planning-relevant scene knowledge in a machine-parsab