7878 2021 eng 26 4 62 article 0 2021-04-16 2021-04-16 -- This paper studies time-inhomogeneous nonequilibrium diffusion processes, including both Brownian dynamics and Langevin dynamics. We derive upper bounds of the relative entropy production of the time-inhomogeneous process with respect to the transient invariant probability measures. We also study the time reversal of the reverse process in Crooks' fluctuation theorem. We show that the time reversal of the reverse process coincides with the optimally controlled forward process that leads to zero variance importance sampling estimator based on Jarzynski's equality. Journal of Mathematical Physics 2006.11212 10.1063/5.0038740 yes 2021-03-29 Wei Zhang Wei Zhang Numerical Mathematics Visual Data Analysis no-project Zhang, Wei Modeling and Simulation of Complex Processes Visual and Data-centric Computing