Hi suchith,
Thanks again for your valuable input!  I’m leaving the office for the day but will definitely try the suggested changes first thing in the morning.
I’ll need to pay attention a bit around the fitting changes you’ve suggested as I need to fit/transform all train_X, train_Y, val_X, val_Y (and test_X which will come later). I was under the impression I would need to call the transform f’n under the getitem function in order to avoid data leakage, but I’ll have a closer look into my custom transform f’n as well - maybe I can change not to assume tensor as input and then simply call ‘transforms.ToTensor()’…?
Regardless, you’ve got me closer than I have been to date and I really appreciate it!
Will keep you posted tomorrow - cheers!