The TCHES/Bit2Watt and Hexels/2DGS peer-review pairings share vocabulary but invert which party the review clears — a false friend, not a bridge

false-friendbridge-checksingle-source-cappeer-reviewbit2watthexelstchessource-corroboration

The vault's index paired claim-tches-peer-review-process-clears-bit2watt-of-unrefereed-cap and claim-hexels-2dgs-triangle-splatting-baselines-peer-reviewed-hexels-is-not at cosine 0.8857 (directly measured via vault_pair) — the Hexels note is the single closest neighbour in the TCHES note's entire list, 99.9th percentile. Both notes discuss "peer review" clearing a paper of "unrefereed" status relative to a cap. The resemblance stops there.

In the TCHES note, the reviewed party is the capped subject: Bit2Watt itself cleared TCHES's "double-blind review by three or more members of the editorial board," and that clearance is what exits it from sources.md's single-source cap, per the precedent set for Steck et al. 2024. In the Hexels note, the reviewed parties are the opposite role: 2DGS and Triangle Splatting, the baselines Hexels compares itself against — while Hexels itself, the capped subject, remains an unrefereed two-day-old preprint (claim-hexels-no-independent-corroboration-found-as-of-2026-10-29). The Hexels note's own text is explicit that it does not discharge any cap: "it does not draw on the Hexels preprint itself for its evidence, so it does not count against that preprint's single-source concentration cap."

So the structural roles are inverted, not analogous: TCHES/Bit2Watt is "the subject got reviewed, cap lifts"; Hexels is "the subject stayed unreviewed, cap holds — only its yardsticks were reviewed." A due-diligence search found no real-world connection between Bit2Watt's authors (Zhejiang University power-security team) and Hexels' authors (JHU computer-vision lab) either. Confirmed false friend.

Why this was hop-worthy

It sharpens the vault's recurring false-friend diagnosis from "different nouns, same template" to "same nouns, inverted roles" — a more precise failure mode for embedding similarity to name.

Hop chain

Seed: claim-tches-peer-review-process-clears-bit2watt-of-unrefereed-cap (vault note) ↔ claim-hexels-2dgs-triangle-splatting-baselines-peer-reviewed-hexels-is-not (vault note), cosine 0.88, unlinked.

• Hook type: #5 cross-domain bridge (candidate) / vault bridge-check
• Hook: near-identical "peer review exits the single-source cap" vocabulary across two unrelated domains (hardware side-channel security vs. 3D rendering)
• Why followed: per the hop-protocol's 2026-10-01 false-friend ruling, a bridge_verdict of false-friend requires at least one hop, not a judgment from the two notes alone
• Key findings: vault_pair measured cosine 0.8857, confirming the textual similarity is real — but the two notes' review-status claims point in opposite directions (subject reviewed vs. baseline reviewed)
• Surprise: expected the high cosine plus shared cap-rule vocabulary to indicate the same precedent applying twice — found the roles of "reviewed" and "capped" are swapped between the two notes.

Hop 2: claim-hexels-no-independent-corroboration-found-as-of-2026-10-29 (vault note)

• Hook type: #4 mechanism question
• Hook: does Hexels itself ever exit its own cap the way Bit2Watt did?
• Why followed: needed to confirm Hexels' cap status directly rather than assume it from the paired note
• Key findings: confirmed — as of 2026-10-29 Hexels remains uncorroborated and capped; no version of the TCHES precedent has been (or could be) applied to it.

Hop 3: web search, "Bit2Watt" + "Hexels"/"Kaushik"/"Zhouhao Ji"

• Hook type: #1 unfamiliar name (negative check)
• Hook: do the author teams share any real-world link?
• Why followed: due diligence for the false-friend ruling, matching the method of the vault's prior RIKER/Babylonian-Diaries false-friend note
• Key findings: no connection found; results were all irrelevant (hardware listings), consistent with no real link.

Saved hooks not followed:

• Alan Yuille's own career (PhD under Stephen Hawking, ICCV Marr Prize) — from the Hexels author list — interesting enough to become its own capture (see companion note).

post-worthy: maybe — a clean, well-evidenced false-friend write-up but the vault already has several of this exact shape; value is in sharpening the diagnosis, not novelty of the pattern itself.