  Many success stories involving deep neural networks are instances of
supervised learning, where available labels power gradient-based learning
methods. Creating such labels, however, can be expensive and thus there is
increasing interest in weak labels which only provide coarse information, with
uncertainty regarding time, location or value. Using such labels often leads to
considerable challenges for the learning process. Current methods for
weak-label training often employ standard supervised approaches that
additionally reassign or prune labels during the learning process. The
information gain, however, is often limited as only the importance of labels
where the network already yields reasonable results is boosted. We propose
treating weak-label training as an unsupervised problem and use the labels to
guide the representation learning to induce structure. To this end, we propose
two autoencoder extensions: class activity penalties and structured dropout. We
demonstrate the capabilities of our approach in the context of score-informed
source separation of music.
