What does functional mean in this context?


It means that you don’t have side effects. In particular, you take the parameters as an input to the function instead of automatically capturing them from the state of the nn.Module


Why isn’t nn.Module functional?


Because when you do mod(inp) it uses a lot of Parameters that are not in the function inputs.


Will this problem be addressed in a future release?


This is something we have in mind yes: transform any nn.Module into a function that takes the Parameters as input. But there are quite a few details to clarify there and it is not done yet.