transform.Normalize isn't idempotent?

I’m confused by what transform.Normalize does. If it just normalizes a tensor to a mean and stdev, then shouldn’t it be idempotent? I find if I run the same normalization multiple times it gives different values. Also it seems that it doesn’t actually set the mean to what it says it does. An example below:

import torch
from torchvision import transforms

normalize = transforms.Normalize(mean=[0.485, 0.456, 0.406], std=[0.229, 0.224, 0.225])
vec = torch.empty((3,10,10)).random_(5)

print(torch.mean(vec, axis=(1,2)))
print(torch.mean(normalize(vec), axis=(1,2)))
print(torch.mean(normalize(normalize(vec)), axis=(1,2)))

Running this prints:

tensor([2.0000, 1.9800, 2.1500])
tensor([6.6157, 6.8036, 7.7511])
tensor([26.7717, 28.3374, 32.6449])

Shouldn’t the means be 0.485, 0.456, 0.406? Why does running normalize(normalize(vec)) give different values than just normalize(vec)? Apologies if I’m missing something obvious!

Hi Chanind!

No, this is not how Normalize works. It does not modify your tensor
to have the specified mean and std. Rather, according to the
documentation for torchvision.transforms.Normalize, it subtracts the
specified mean from your tensor and then divides by the specified
std (on a per-channel basis).

Best.

K. Frank