avalon1511:

and the suggested solution was to use strict = False to fix this error


Yeah, you should be a bit careful about using this argument, as it’s ignoring the (valid) error and is thus not used by default.
Your issue seems to be caused by nn.DataParallel, which will add the .module tag to each parameter and buffer.
You could thus either remove the .module tags manually from the state_dict, wrap the model into nn.DataParallel before loading the state_dict, or store the state_dict from the underlying model using torch.save(model.module.state_dict(), PATH).