I manually defined a DenseNet as follows, the core code is from torchvision.models.densenet121, the others are kept same. My denseNet definition:
class DenseNet(nn.Module):
    r"""Densenet-BC model class, based on
    `"Densely Connected Convolutional Networks" <https://arxiv.org/pdf/1608.06993.pdf>`_

    Args:
        growth_rate (int) - how many filters to add each layer (`k` in paper)
        block_config (list of 4 ints) - how many layers in each pooling block
        num_init_features (int) - the number of filters to learn in the first convolution layer
        bn_size (int) - multiplicative factor for number of bottle neck layers
          (i.e. bn_size * k features in the bottleneck layer)
        drop_rate (float) - dropout rate after each dense layer
        num_classes (int) - number of classification classes
    """

    def __init__(self, growth_rate=32, block_config=(6, 12, 24, 16),
                 num_init_features=64, bn_size=4, drop_rate=0, num_classes=198):

        super(DenseNet, self).__init__()

        # First convolution
        self.features = nn.Sequential(OrderedDict([
            ('conv0', nn.Conv2d(3, num_init_features, kernel_size=7, stride=2, padding=3, bias=False)),
            ('norm0', nn.BatchNorm2d(num_init_features)),
            ('relu0', nn.ReLU(inplace=True)),
            ('pool0', nn.MaxPool2d(kernel_size=3, stride=2, padding=1)),
        ]))

        # Each denseblock
        num_features = num_init_features
        for i, num_layers in enumerate(block_config):
            block = _DenseBlock(num_layers=num_layers, num_input_features=num_features,
                                bn_size=bn_size, growth_rate=growth_rate, drop_rate=drop_rate)
            self.features.add_module('denseblock%d' % (i + 1), block)
            num_features = num_features + num_layers * growth_rate
            if i != len(block_config) - 1:
                trans = _Transition(num_input_features=num_features, num_output_features=num_features // 2)
                self.features.add_module('transition%d' % (i + 1), trans)
                num_features = num_features // 2

        # Final batch norm
        self.features.add_module('norm5', nn.BatchNorm2d(num_features))

        # Linear layer
        self.classifier = nn.Linear(num_features, num_classes)

        # Official init from torch repo.
        for m in self.modules():
            if isinstance(m, nn.Conv2d):
                nn.init.kaiming_normal_(m.weight)
            elif isinstance(m, nn.BatchNorm2d):
                nn.init.constant_(m.weight, 1)
                nn.init.constant_(m.bias, 0)
            elif isinstance(m, nn.Linear):
                nn.init.constant_(m.bias, 0)

    def forward(self, x):
        features = self.features(x)
        out = F.relu(features, inplace=True)
        feat = F.adaptive_avg_pool2d(out, (1, 1)).view(features.size(0), -1)
        out = self.classifier(feat)

        return feat.view(-1, 1024), out

By referring to PyTorch tutorial transfer learning chapter. I also try this without ImageNet weights:
densenet121 = models.densenet121(pretrained=False)
num_ftrs = densenet121.classifier.in_features
densenet121.classifier = nn.Linear(num_ftrs, 198)

After training, I got two quite different results. The latter one has 60%+ Acc, while the former one only has 20%+ Acc. I don’t know how to figure this out, since they are the same model. Is there anything wrong in my implementation?