MotoVerse: A Benchmark for Predictive Perception of Motorized Two-Wheelers in Dense Unstructured Traffic

Motorized Two-Wheelers (MTWs) dominate personal transport across much of the Global South, yet remain largely overlooked in predictive perception research for autonomous driving and ADAS. We introduce MotoVerse, a benchmark for predictive perception from an MTW's ego-centric perspective. MotoVerse comprises 949 maneuver clips collected in dense, unstructured traffic and trajectory annotations for over 31,000 surrounding road agents, including over 16,000 MTWs, enabling two complementary tasks: Ego-Rider Maneuver Anticipation (ERMA) and Traffic Agent Trajectory Prediction (TATP). Each clip is further annotated with an MTW-specific challenge taxonomy comprising dynamic ego-motion, weak traffic structure and contextual occlusion, enabling challenge-aware evaluation. We benchmark established conventional prediction models, general-purpose Vision-Language Models (VLMs), driving-specific VLMs and vision-language-action models. Our experiments reveal three key insights: (i) video backbones reach most of their full-observation accuracy from the first fifth of a maneuver, whereas zero-shot VLMs need most of the maneuver to be observed; (ii) zero-shot VLMs, whether general-purpose or driving-specific, largely remain close to simple baselines on both tasks; a preliminary LoRA study shows that adaptation lifts anticipation sharply but leaves trajectory prediction behind conventional models; and (iii) the rider's own motion drives forecasting difficulty: for every model, including a static baseline, errors are highest during left turns and rise under dynamic ego-motion. We believe MotoVerse will serve as a challenging benchmark for safer and more robust predictive AI for intelligent two-wheelers. The dataset and evaluation code are publicly available at https://github.com/VarunIIITH/MotoVerse.