So the context I found this symbol in is a research paper where it was present as part of an equation. This symbol was never mentioned later so I have no idea what it means. Any help would be appreciated.
Sorry if this sounds like a dumb question.
Edit: Someone commented that it might be better for me to include the name of the paper, and I'll do that. The paper is called "Enhanced Bayesian Compression via Deep Reinforcement Learning." Thanks
It denotes the PDF at $w_i$ of a Normal distribution with mean $c_i$ and standard deviation $z_i$, and so $\mathcal{N}(w_i|c_i,\,z_i^2)=\frac{1}{z_i\sqrt{2\pi}}\exp-\frac{(w_i-c_i)^2}{2z_i^2}$. Such a distribution is commonly considered in that field.