Max Welling is the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of the startup CuspAI, and a Full Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Amsterdam. He is a member of the Dutch Royal Academy of Sciences and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and a fellow of the European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems. Professor Welling received the ECCV Koenderink Prize in 2010, the 2021 ICML Test of Time Award, and the 2024 ICLR Test of Time Award.

Preface; Acknowledgement; Why stochastic thermodynamics of machine learning?; Part I. Preliminaries: 1. Mathematical preliminaries; 2. Neural network preliminaries; 3. Physics preliminaries; Part II. Discrete-time Stochastic Dynamics:4. Latent variable models and graphical models; 5. Thermodynamics of probabilistic machine learning; 6. Belief propagation; 7. The variational autoencoder; 8. Normalizing flows; 9. Markov processes and time reversal; 10. Stochastic thermodynamics; 11. Markov chain Monte Carlo; 12. Sequential importance sampling; 13. Variational diusion models; 14. Schrö dinger bridges; 15. Optimal control; 16. Generative flow networks; 17. Fluctuation theorems; 18. Free energy estimation; 19. Escorted free energy estimations and fluctuation theorems; 20. Hybrid stochastic flows and surjective flows; Part III. Continuous-time Probabilistic Dynamics: 21. Stochastic thermodynamics from the Fokker-Planck equation; 22. Optimal transport and Schrö dinger bridge; 23. Continuous normalizing flows and flow matching; Part IV. Epilogue: 24. Unication: free energy is all you need; Bibliography; Index.