Search Results (12)

Generative video diffusion models (GVDs) generate high-fidelity, text-conditioned videos but risk producing unsafe or copyrighted content due to training on large, uncurated datasets. Concept erasure techniques aim to remove such harmful concepts from pre-trained models while preserving overall generative performance. However, existing methods mainly target single-concept erasure and thus cannot satisfy the demand for simultaneously eliminating multi-concept in real-world scenarios. On the one hand, naively applying single-concept erasure sequentially to multi-concept often yields suboptimal results due to conflicts among target concepts; on the other hand, methods that alter concept mappings exhibit very poor adaptability and fail to accommodate the dynamic concept changes. To address these, we propose ConceptVoid, a scalable multi-concept erasure framework formulated as a constrained multi-objective optimization problem. For each target concept, an erasure loss is defined as the discrepancy between noise predictions conditioned and unconditioned on the concept. Non-target generation capabilities are preserved via output-distribution alignment regularization. We apply the multiple gradient descent algorithm (MGDA) to obtain Pareto-optimal solutions, aiming to minimize conflicts among different concept erasure objectives. In addition, we improve MGDA by introducing an importance-weighting mechanism, which adjusts the weights of gradients corresponding to each erasure objective, enabling flexible control over the priority and intensity of erasing different concepts, thereby enhancing the scalability of ConceptVoid. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of ConceptVoid, validating our key contributions: (1) a scalable framework for multi-concept erasure in GVDs; (2) the integration of per-concept erasure with distribution alignment to retain non-target quality; and (3) an enhanced MGDA for conflict-aware, controllable erasure. Full article

‘Marriage equality’ has been a widely used slogan and mobilizing concept for LGBTQ+ rights’ movements across the globe striving for formal recognition for ‘same-sex’ or ‘same-gender’ marriages. In this article, we critically interrogate the terminology and political rationality that have given shape to ‘marriage equality’ campaigns. We demonstrate the structural erasure of non-monogamous relations and populations from the changes hoped for and envisioned in these mobilizations. The lack of any genuine and substantial concern with consensual non-monogamies (CNMs) from most of the literature in the field highlights the close entanglement of marriage with monogamy. As a result, ideas are scarce about how meaningful and adequate legal recognition and social policy provisions for a wide range of intimate, sexual, familial, and/or caring bonds or constellations on the CNM continuum could look like. We argue that the critique of the mononormativity inherent to marriage is fundamental to understanding the role of this in the 21st century. We identify the roots of the mononormativity of marriage in its governmental role as a necropolitical and biopolitical technology, evidenced by its ‘civilizing’ function in white settler colonial projects. Because of this, an expansion of the call for equality to include non-monogamous populations does not resolve but rather aggravates the problem. We conclude that any truly queer politics of CNM consequently needs to be anti-marriage. Full article

In a previous paper, we introduced an axiomatic system for information thermodynamics, deriving an entropy function that includes both thermodynamic and information components. From this function, we derived an entropic probability distribution for certain uniform collections of states. Here, we extend the concept of entropic probability to more general collections, augmenting the states by reservoir and context states. This leads to an abstract concept of free energy and establishes a relation between free energy, information erasure, and generalized work. Full article

The present article scrutinizes the intricacies surrounding defensive warfare aimed at reclaiming territories perceived by Muslims as under non-Muslim occupation through the lens of the four Sunni schools and Twelver Shia perspectives. In Shia jurisprudence, in the absence of the twelfth Imam, the concept of defensive war does not extend to reclaiming Islamic territories per se; rather, Muslims are not sanctioned to engage in warfare solely for territorial defense. Instead, the imperative for Muslim involvement in armed conflict arises only when the fundamental tenets of Islam face jeopardy. According to Shia’s legal interpretation, jeopardizing the core principles of Islam implies a scenario where the erasure of Prophet Muhammad’s legacy and the utter annihilation of Sharia law are imminent. Such a predicament is not contingent upon the occupation of Islamic lands. However, Sunni jurisprudence posits a prerequisite for Muslims to engage in warfare, even in defense, necessitating a certainty of prevailing in the conflict. Consequently, given the contemporary milieu, wherein the requisite conditions for assured victory remain unattainable and are likely unattainable, defensive warfare for territorial reclamation is deemed impermissible. The findings of this inquiry propose an Islamic legal framework that advocates abstention from resorting to warfare concerning the mentioned territories in current circumstances, absolving Muslims of any obligation in this regard. Closing the avenue of armed conflict thereby paves the way for alternative avenues such as negotiation, reconciliation, and peace-building. It underscores Islam’s reverence for human life, prioritizing it over territorial concerns. Full article

This article delves into the underexplored intersection of Jewish identities and feminist art. It critically examines artworks by Judit Hersko and Susan Hiller, aligning with evolving identity constructs in contemporary aesthetics. Concepts like “postmemory” link second-generation Jewish artists to past experiences and unveil the erasure of Jewish women’s memory of Jewish genocide. Analyzing Hersko and Hiller’s diverse works, from landscape photography and sculpture to performance art, it underscores their shared pursuit: illuminating lingering “ghosts” of the Holocaust in modern landscapes. Susan Hiller’s The J Street Project represents an ongoing exploration of loss and trauma beyond the Holocaust in Germany, using archives as a dynamic, evolving phenomenon. Judit Hersko’s art calls for bearing witness to a potential climate catastrophe in Antarctica. The article culminates in the exploration of “The Memorial” (2017), an art project by the activist collective Center for Political Beauty that focuses on the resurgence of overt anti-Semitism in Germany. In essence, Hiller and Hersko confront erasures in history and nature, emphasizing justice and repair. Their art, intertwined with a project addressing contemporary anti-Semitism, serves as a testament to the enduring power of feminist art, reflecting, mourning, and transforming a world marked by historical traumas and war. Full article

The Bible translated into South Africa’s indigenous languages has a colonial history. For the Vhavenḓa people, the 1936 and 1998 Bible translations are revered as icons that hold a privileged position. However, this paper argues that these two translations should be seen as colonial language tools that do not serve the culture of the Vhavenḓa people. Instead, they can be viewed as weapons against them. These translations distorted the Tshivenḓa language by imposing distorted and foreign concepts of God, thereby rendering the Vhavenḓa people to have been without knowledge of God. Full article

During gestation, maternal (F0), embryonic (F1), and migrating primordial germ cell (F2) genomes can be simultaneously exposed to environmental influences. Accumulating evidence suggests that operating epi- or above the genetic DNA sequence, covalent DNA methylation (DNAme) can be recorded onto DNA in response to environmental insults, some sites which escape normal germline erasure. These appear to intrinsically regulate future disease propensity, even transgenerationally. Thus, an organism’s genome can undergo epigenetic adjustment based on environmental influences experienced by prior generations. During the earliest stages of mammalian development, the three-dimensional presentation of the genome is dramatically changed, and DNAme is removed genome wide. Why, then, do some pathological DNAme patterns appear to be heritable? Are these correctable? In the following sections, I review concepts of transgenerational epigenetics and recent work towards programming transgenerational DNAme. A framework for editing heritable DNAme and challenges are discussed, and ethics in human research is introduced. Full article

This article considers Rachel Greenwald Smith’s concept of the “Affective Turn” in contemporary fiction by looking at a constellation of novels published near the turn of the twenty-first century: David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001), Percival Everett’s Erasure (2001), and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000). As Rachel Greenwald Smith claims, this “Turn” offers a “corrective or counter to postmodernist suspicion towards subjective emotion” and has foundations of sincerity and authenticity, which align it with the premise of post-postmodernism. These novels, I argue, collectively engage with the affective turn’s inherent post-postmodern potential, as their authors respond to, challenge, and react against postmodern irony and the license of inauthenticity that comes with this. Full article

This paper articulates a paradigm shift in the adoption of a critical ecopedagogy focused on substantive and systemic change within nature sports. In analyzing the unifying concept of nature sports, we propose an ontological shift towards genuine sustainability, a communion among people and with nature. These activities comprise a group of physical practices that have the potential to challenge participants in novel ways that provide an alternative to traditional sports and the ideological values associated with these dominant sports, such as competition and personal gain. Nature sports inscribe meaning on bodies in motion, with a blurring or erasure of boundaries, as participants become one with nature rather than seeking to exploit or conquer it. These novel and countercultural practices promise the possibility of systemic sustainability, as participants redefine sport in terms of relational equity and ecoliteracy. As a utopian project, this systems approach recognizes the nature-sport nexus as a living framework to honor culturally appropriate practices and traditions in building an ecological movement centered on environmental justice. In this way, nature sports offer an opportunity to reimagine sustainable development through the promotion of a circular, rather than linear, economy—an economy based on re-creation rather than exploitation and waste. Full article

Monomial codes were recently equipped with partial order relations, a fact that allowed researchers to discover structural properties and efficient algorithm for constructing polar codes. Here, we refine the existing order relations in the particular case of the binary erasure channel. The new order relation takes us closer to the ultimate order relation induced by the pointwise evaluation of the Bhattacharyya parameter of the synthetic channels, which is still a partial order relation. To overcome this issue, we appeal to a related technique from network theory. Reliability network theory was recently used in the context of polar coding and more generally in connection with decreasing monomial codes. In this article, we investigate how the concept of average reliability is applied for polar codes designed for the binary erasure channel. Instead of minimizing the error probability of the synthetic channels, for a particular value of the erasure parameter p, our codes minimize the average error probability of the synthetic channels. By means of basic network theory results, we determine a closed formula for the average reliability of a particular synthetic channel, that recently gain the attention of researchers. Full article

The meaning and evolution of the notion of “temperature” (which is a key concept for the condensed and gaseous matter theories) are addressed from different points of view. The concept of temperature has turned out to be much more fundamental than conventionally thought. In particular, the temperature may be introduced for systems built of a “small” number of particles and particles at rest. The Kelvin temperature scale may be introduced into quantum and relativistic physics due to the fact that the efficiency of the quantum and relativistic Carnot cycles coincides with that of the classical one. The relation of temperature with the metrics of the configurational space describing the behavior of systems built from non-interacting particles is demonstrated. The role of temperature in constituting inertia and gravity forces treated as entropy forces is addressed. The Landauer principle asserts that the temperature of a system is the only physical value defining the energy cost of the isothermal erasure of a single bit of information. The fundamental role of the temperature of the cosmic microwave background in modern cosmology is discussed. The range of problems and controversies related to the negative absolute temperature is treated. Full article

This article considers the relationship between photojournalism and literature about HIV/AIDS in Romania from the late 1980s and the 1990s to examine the ways in which photo-textual relations localize and perpetuate a specific ideological understanding of the AIDS epidemic. The pictures taken by Frank Fournier in Bucharest won the Word Press Photo’s first prize in 1990 and established the AIDS epidemic’s image in and about Romania. Using Diana Taylor’s concept of percepticide to think about what the photographs simultaneously reflect and obscure through an active training of the audience’s gaze, in tandem with Lynn Mie Itagaki’s theorization of visuality of vulnerability as a biopolitical heuristic, I examine the photographs performative erasure of AIDS alongside Rodica Mătușa’s (semi) autobiography, Nobody’s Angels. My Life Alongside Children Living with AIDS. The close-up pictures of malnourished children in a dilapidated hospital have a gritty, abrasive texture that perform a defacing function and dehumanize the central subject. The short descriptions accompanying Fournier’s work, alongside Mătușa’s book, present the images as illustrations and consequences of the Romanian communist regime’s biopolitical measures and tie the medical emergency to the communist ideology. The texts and the photographs impose a methodology of looking, of reading and seeing as evidence of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s austerity measures in the late 1980s in Romania, while the centrality of infants’ naked, malnourished bodies fabricate a causal relationship that obscures larger medical and cultural networks. I claim that image-text interrelations instrumentalize and localize the AIDS epidemic by visually emphasizing vulnerability as a direct result of communism, while dehumanizing and effacing the infants’ and children’s bodies. Full article