Towards Generative Predictive Display for Vision-Based Teleoperation: A Zero-Shot Benchmark of Off-the-Shelf Video Models
Teleoperation systems are fundamentally limited by communication latency, which degrades situational awareness and control performance. Predictive display aims to mitigate this limitation by presenting an estimate of the current visual state rather than delayed observations. While recent advances in generative video models enable high-quality video synthesis, their suitability for latency-sensitive predictive display remains unclear. This paper presents a zero-shot benchmark of off-the-shelf generative video models for short-horizon predictive display, without task-specific fine-tuning. We formulate the problem as rollout-based future frame prediction and develop a unified benchmarking pipeline using simulated driving data from the CARLA simulator. Five publicly released video models spanning transformer-based and diffusion-based families are evaluated across two resolutions and two conditioning regimes (multi-frame and single-frame). Performance is assessed using prediction accuracy (mean absolute difference), per-rollout latency, peak GPU memory usage, and temporal error evolution across the prediction horizon. On this zero-shot benchmark, no tested model simultaneously achieves low rollout error, non-divergent per-step error behavior, and real-time inference at the source frame rate. Increasing model scale or resolution yields limited and, in some cases, inverted improvements. These findings highlight a gap between general-purpose generative video synthesis and the requirements of predictive display in teleoperation, suggesting that practical deployment will require either explicit short-horizon temporal supervision, in-domain adaptation, or aggressive inference optimization rather than direct application of off-the-shelf models. Code, configurations, and qualitative results are released on the project page: https://bimilab.github.io/paper-GenPD