"Loss function" is one of the most basic concepts today in deep learning. Despite that, it is actually not necessarily a good programming abstraction when designing general-purpose systems. A system should not assume that a model always comes together with a "loss function".

Building a library for research and experiments is quite different from building other types of software. A key challenge is that, in research, abstractions and APIs are rarely set in stone: users may want to propose a slight variant or modification to literally ANYWHERE in the whole program, just because they have a new idea.