All valid points! To add to that, the resulting invocation is also not exactly a ‘pure’ function. I’ve split it for now since it seems like a better design.
The reason I was a bit hesitant was because the split is in my encoder’s feature extractor (Xception), but the intermediate output is required much later in my decoder (DeepLab V3+), and I wanted to make these modules as independent as possible, to avoid having to refer two papers while reviewing either module in the future.