  PredNet, a deep predictive coding network developed by Lotter et al.,
combines a biologically inspired architecture based on the propagation of
prediction error with self-supervised representation learning in video. While
the architecture has drawn a lot of attention and various extensions of the
model exist, there is a lack of a critical analysis. We fill in the gap by
evaluating PredNet both as an implementation of the predictive coding theory
and as a self-supervised video prediction model using a challenging video
action classification dataset. We design an extended model to test if
conditioning future frame predictions on the action class of the video improves
the model performance. We show that PredNet does not yet completely follow the
principles of predictive coding. The proposed top-down conditioning leads to a
performance gain on synthetic data, but does not scale up to the more complex
real-world action classification dataset. Our analysis is aimed at guiding
future research on similar architectures based on the predictive coding theory.
