A note on the definition of gravitational energy for quadratic curvature gravity via topological regularization

Within the framework of four-dimensional quadratic curvature gravities in the appearance of a negative cosmological constant, a definition for the gravitational energy of solutions with anti-de Sitter (AdS) asymptotics was put forward in Ref. [1]. This was achieved by adding proper topological invariant terms to the gravity action to render the variation problem well-posed. In the present note, we prove that the definition via the procedure of topological regularization can be covered by the one given in Ref. [3] in four dimensions. Motivated by this, we further generalize the results to generic gravity theories in arbitrary even dimensions.