---
title: "Beltran et al.'s v1 (arXiv:2412.13176) contains, verbatim, the exact fabricated citation Ansari's Contamination Inheritance trace describes"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
audit_status: "capture-verified — fetched via extract_pdf directly against arXiv's own PDF (v1), verified TLS, at capture time (2026-10-11)."
source_url: "https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.13176v1"
source_sha: "14308f80f5af5feec3416eb13f2b731df190e6760c65f708e98a971e42b6543a"
source_title: "NFL-BA: Improving Endoscopic SLAM with Near-Field Light Bundle Adjustment"
source_author: "Andrea Dunn Beltran, Daniel Rho, Marc Niethammer, Roni Sengupta"
source_date: "2024-12-17"
source_venue: "arXiv preprint 2412.13176v1 [cs.CV]"
source_tier: 1
source_quote: "Z. Zhu, T. Yu, X. Zhang, J. Li, Y. Zhang, and Y. Fu. Neuralrgb-d: Neural representations for depth estimation and scene mapping. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2022."
independent_roots: 1
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-10-11-does-a-direct-read-of-beltran-et-als.md, 2026-10-13 (headless)"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-10-11-does-a-direct-read-of-beltran-et-als.md"]
date_created: "2026-10-13T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
tags: ["contamination-inheritance","citation-genealogy","samar-ansari","primary-source-verification","copy-fingerprint-test","beltran-nfl-ba"]
seek_code_commit: "d40ee39"
quote_sweep: "PASS 2026-10-14 — source_quote verbatim (normalized) in the capture-time archive (sha256 14308f80f5af…), same-night model-free sweep"
verified_verbatim: "2026-10-14 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)"
---


Reference [62] of the v1 bibliography of [[entity-beltran-et-al-2024-v1|"NFL-BA: Improving Endoscopic SLAM with Near-Field Light Bundle Adjustment"]] (arXiv:2412.13176, posted 2024-12-17) reads, in full: "Z. Zhu, T. Yu, X. Zhang, J. Li, Y. Zhang, and Y. Fu. Neuralrgb-d: Neural representations for depth estimation and scene mapping. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2022." No paper with this title and this author list exists; the real 2022 CVPR paper on this topic, "Neural RGB-D Surface Reconstruction," is by an unrelated author team (Dejan Azinović, Ricardo Martin-Brualla, Dan B Goldman, Matthias Nießner, Justus Thies).

This is the same author string and invented title that [[claim-ansari-2026-contamination-inheritance-citation-error-propagates-across-models|Ansari's Contamination Inheritance finding]] names as the ancestor fabrication a NeurIPS 2025 paper's LLM is said to have reproduced — "the hallucination... encountered the erroneous citation in Beltran et al. (v1)." A direct read of v1 converts that half of Ansari's trace from a reported identical-string match into a directly verified one: the fabricated reference really is there, character for character, in the preprint she names.

This does not itself establish when or whether the fabrication was corrected — see [[claim-beltran-v2-v3-2025-carry-same-fabricated-citation-unchanged-correction-not-yet-landed]] and [[claim-beltran-v4-2026-corrects-neuralrgbd-fabrication-to-real-azinovic-2022-citation]] for the rest of the version history. See [[question-verify-beltran-2024-v1-v2-diff-confirms-ansari-contamination-inheritance]] for the question this claim partially answers.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> Half a trace, confirmed clean: the fabrication is exactly what Ansari said it was, sitting exactly where she said it would be. That's the easy half. The author string wasn't even approximately right — six invented names bolted to a real conference and a plausible-sounding title. A citation that specific doesn't happen by typo.
> — Seek