Solution of $\int p_\theta(z) \log q(z) dz $ of Gaussian case Following is from the original paper of concept of VAE(variational autoencoder) by Kingma,Welling 2014
B. Solution of $D_{KL}(p_\phi(z)||q_\theta(z))$ of Gaussian case
The variational lower bound (the objective to be maximized) contains a KL term that can often be
integrated analytically. Here we give the solution when both the prior $q_{\theta}(z) = N (0, I)$ and the posterior approximation $p_\phi(z|x^{
(i)})$ are Gaussian. Let $J$ be the dimensionality of $z$. Let $\mu$ and $\sigma$
denote the variational mean and standard deviation evaluated at datapoint $i$, and let $\mu_j$ and $\sigma_j$ simply denote the $j$-th element of these vectors. Then:
$$\int
p_\theta(z) \log q(z) dz\\ =
\int
N (z; \mu,\sigma^2
) \log N (z; 0, I) dz\\
= −
{J\over 
2}
\log(2\pi) −
{1\over
2}
\sum_{j=1}^{J}
(\mu_j{^2} + \sigma_j^2
)$$
At the equation above can't understand how the second equality calculated. Any hint to understand those eqaulity?
 A: In this case, I find it easier to start from a simple case and then build up in complexity. The simplest case is to consider $J=1$.
$$
\begin{align}
-\int_{-\infty}^{\infty} p(z) \log(q(z)) dz 
&= \frac{1}{2}\log(2\pi\sigma_2^2) - \int p(z) \left(-\frac{\left(z - \mu_2\right)^2}{2 \sigma_2^2}\right)dz \\
&= \frac{1}{2}\log(2\pi\sigma_2^2) + \frac{\mathbb{E}_{z\sim p}[z^2] - 2 \mathbb{E}_{z\sim p}[z]\mu_2 +\mu_2^2} {2\sigma_2^2} \\
&= \frac{1}{2}\log(2\pi\sigma_2^2) + \frac{\sigma_1^2 + \mu_1^2-2\mu_1\mu_2+\mu_2^2}{2\sigma_2^2} \\
&= \frac{1}{2}\log(2\pi\sigma_2^2) + \frac{\sigma_1^2 + (\mu_1 - \mu_2)^2}{2\sigma_2^2}\\
\int_{-\infty}^{\infty} p(z) \log(q(z)) dz = V &= -\frac{1}{2}\log(2\pi\sigma_2^2)-\frac{\sigma_1^2 + (\mu_1 - \mu_2)^2}{2\sigma_2^2}
\end{align}
$$
The key is recognizing that we can expand the quadratic in the first line; this gives us a sum of several integrals. Then we apply the law of the unconscious statistician, and we use the fact that $\text{Var}(z)=\mathbb{E}[z^2]-\mathbb{E}[z]^2$. The rest is just rearranging.
In this special case, we know that $q$ is a standard normal, so
$$
\begin{align}
-\frac{1}{2}\log(2\pi\sigma_2^2)-\frac{\sigma_1^2 + (\mu_1 - \mu_2)^2}{2\sigma_2^2} &= -\frac{1}{2} \log(2\pi) -\frac{1}{2}\left(\sigma_1^2 + \mu_1^2\right)
\end{align}
$$
How can we generalize this to $J>1$? Consider the case of a diagonal covariance matrix. In this case, the $z_j$ are independent. So the solution arises from the sum of $V_j$. If you're not convinced, then you'll need to crank through the matrix arithmetic, using multivariate normal $p$ and $q$. It's not particularly hard, it's just tedious. Here's some threads to get started:

*

*KL-Divergence of $Q(z|X)$ and $P(z)$ in Variational Autoencoder (VAE)
