I still cannot reproduce this issue using my code snippet and by replacing models.alexnet() with models.SqueezeNet(). Both hooks return a valid grad value and the first approach will raise the expected deprecation warning.
Were you able to run into the error using my code snippet?
Note that I’m using a source build with:
torch.__version__
'1.9.0a0+git6d45d7a'

torchvision.__version__
'0.11.0a0+882e11d'