Here's a diagram of a variational auto-encoder.
There are 2 nodes before the sample (encoding vector). One is the mean, one is the standard deviation. The mean one is confusing.
Is it the mean of values or is it the mean deviation?
$$\text{mean} = \dfrac{X_i+..+X_n}{N}$$
$$\text{mean deviation} = \dfrac{[X_i|+..+|X_n|}{N}$$