  We construct custom regularization functions for use in supervised training
of deep neural networks. Our technique is applicable when the ground-truth
labels themselves exhibit internal structure; we derive a regularizer by
learning an autoencoder over the set of annotations. Training thereby becomes a
two-phase procedure. The first phase models labels with an autoencoder. The
second phase trains the actual network of interest by attaching an auxiliary
branch that must predict output via a hidden layer of the autoencoder. After
training, we discard this auxiliary branch.
  We experiment in the context of semantic segmentation, demonstrating this
regularization strategy leads to consistent accuracy boosts over baselines,
both when training from scratch, or in combination with ImageNet pretraining.
Gains are also consistent over different choices of convolutional network
architecture. As our regularizer is discarded after training, our method has
zero cost at test time; the performance improvements are essentially free. We
are simply able to learn better network weights by building an abstract model
of the label space, and then training the network to understand this
abstraction alongside the original task.
