Thank you for suggestion. In case of using the functional, you would still need to declare and keep the weights somewhere in the class separately. If the weights are declared in the Init call, it still has the decoupling of declaration and computation which is inconvenient with large code. If I declared the weight initialization inside the “forward”, it would slightly reduce the number of lines of code needed for initialization/declaration compared to my code above, but not eliminate it. Ideally I want no extra code needed to declare and use a network, like in my last example of the “autonet” above, where a single line of code does all of the declaration and computation.