Why we learn $\log{\sigma^2}$ in VAE reparameterization trick instead of standard deviation?

We know that the reparameterization trick is to learn two vectors $$\sigma$$ and $$\mu$$, sample $$\epsilon$$ from $$N(0, 1)$$ and then your latent vector $$Z$$ would be (where $$\odot$$ is the element-wise product.): $$Z = \mu + \sigma\odot\epsilon$$

However, in the TensorFlow TensorFlow tutorial code for VAEs, it is learning $$\log{\sigma^2}$$ and then transform it to $$\sigma$$ with Exp. The code is here:

def reparameterize(self, mean, logvar):
eps = tf.random.normal(shape=mean.shape)
return eps * tf.exp(logvar * .5) + mean

which is showing this: $$Z = \mu + \epsilon\times e^{0.5\times\log{\sigma^2}} = \mu + \epsilon\times e^{\log{\sqrt{\sigma^2}}} = \mu + \epsilon\times \sigma$$

I know that we learn $$\log{\sigma^2}$$ instead of $$\sigma^2$$ because the variance of a random variable is constrained to be positive (i.e. $$\sigma^2 \in \mathbb{R}^+$$) and so if we were to try to learn the variance we would have to constrain somehow the output of a neural network to be positive. A simple way around this is to learn the logarithm instead since $$\log(\sigma^2) \in \mathbb{R}$$ ensures that $$\exp(\log(\sigma^2)) \in \mathbb{R}^+$$ (thanks to this answer).

BUT I don't understand why don't we just learn $$\log{\sigma}$$? why do we learn variance instead of standards deviation?

1. It doesn't make any real difference; since $$\log \sigma^2= 2\log \sigma$$; learning one is as easy as learning the other
2. It's traditional in statistics to think of $$\sigma^2$$ as the second parameter of a Normal distribution (rather than $$\sigma$$).
3. There's a simple unbiased estimator for $$\sigma^2$$ but not for $$\sigma$$
4. The math for representing the Normal as a two-parameter exponential family is slightly simpler as $$(\mu, \sigma^2)$$ than $$(\mu, \sigma)$$