I've pushed commit https://github.com/gunnarmorling/hibernate-validator/commit/09cb95b7b4679f2e6aee6b1a54b30e0c2042eeca on top of this branch to my fork. It avoids the special handling of the parameter case; I think the problem was that cross-parameter constraints were not excluded from being passed to the TR. If you think that change is good feel free to include it.