I see the issue here.
Also RandomResizedCrop scales the image to scale=(0.08, 1.0) by default, which seems to contradict my claim.
One possible explanation would be, that the model with the best validation accuracy is saved and reused later in the tutorial (code 44).
so in other words, you use the best model applying the ‘val’ transformation.
Do you see the same behavior, if you remove the CenterCrop, just resize the image, and train the model again?