Yes, it’s better to do it the regular way with download = True.
It looks like it doesn’t recognize MNIST.data
rand_idx = torch.randperm(len(mnist.data))[:self.mnist_len]

AttributeError: 'MNIST' object has no attribute 'data'

if I add # before that line (and the next one) it works well. It’s a bit odd it says it doesn’t have that attribute.