Beltran et al. (arXiv:2412.13176) now anchors three claim-notes directly, with further in-text findings blocked by the single-source concentration cap — what would corroborate it?
As of 2026-10-13, three notes in 30-notes/ rest directly on Beltran, Rho, (Pizer,) Niethammer & Sengupta's "NFL-BA: Improving Endoscopic SLAM with Near-Field Light Bundle Adjustment" (arXiv:2412.13176) as their source_url:
- claim-beltran-v1-2024-contains-verbatim-neuralrgbd-fabrication-ansari-traced
- claim-beltran-v2-v3-2025-carry-same-fabricated-citation-unchanged-correction-not-yet-landed
- claim-beltran-v4-2026-corrects-neuralrgbd-fabrication-to-real-azinovic-2022-citation
Per sources.md's single-source concentration cap (Cali, 2026-07-29): "No more than three claim-notes may rest on a single unrefereed primary... until at least one independent source corroborates it," where v1 through v4 of the same preprint are explicitly "the same source wearing different clothes." That count is exactly three. The cap is reached.
What this blocked
The promotion of 10-inbox/raw/2026-10-11-does-a-direct-read-of-beltran-et-als.md (2026-10-13) produced a full direct read of all four versions' bibliographies, which turned up two further citation-corruption findings in the same document that would otherwise have been worth their own notes:
Held finding 1 — a second, independent garbled citation in v1. v1's reference [60], for "Nice-slam," gives the year 2021 and is attached to the same wrong six-author string as the Neuralrgb-d fabrication ("Z. Zhu, T. Yu, X. Zhang, J. Li, Y. Zhang, and Y. Fu") — sitting alongside a separately correct NICE-SLAM citation with the true author list two entries later (v1 ref [61]: Zihan Zhu, Songyou Peng, Viktor Larsson, Weiwei Xu, Hujun Bao, Zhaopeng Cui, Martin R. Oswald, Marc Pollefeys, CVPR 2022). The duplicate/garbled-author pattern — the identical wrong string reused across two different reference entries in the same bibliography — is suggestive of an LLM-assisted citation-generation error distinct from the Neuralrgb-d case, but how the duplication arose was not checked this session ([unverified-mechanism — needs primary]).
Held finding 2 — a third, distinct mutation in v2. v2's citation [69] for NICE-SLAM uses yet another wrong author string (from v1's NICER-SLAM entry: "A. Zhu, Z. Zhang, H. Su, L. Li, G. Wang, and X. Li") attached to the title "Nice-slam" with the correct 2022/CVPR venue — not identical to any single v1 entry, so a fresh mutation rather than a copy of finding 1. Whether this reflects further LLM-assisted editing between v1 and v2, or manual error, was not established.
Neither finding was checked against Ansari's own dataset or methodology, and both are blocked by the cap regardless of that gap.
What would discharge the cap
No independent corroboration has been checked for yet — no citation, replication, or third-party technical discussion of arXiv:2412.13176 by a different author group in a different venue has been looked for. A different path specific to this source: establishing whether the paper has since been accepted to a refereed venue (it is currently only an arXiv preprint across all four versions read) would, per the precedent set at question-corroborate-bit2watt-single-source-cap (now answered), take it outside the cap's "unrefereed primary" category if a genuine committee peer-review record can be found at the primary.
Until one of these lands, the branch stays exactly as it is — three notes, seedling, honest — and no new Beltran-sourced claim-note should be written, including the two held findings above.
Progress log
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