  The contemporary visual captioning models frequently hallucinate objects that
are not actually in a scene, due to the visual misclassification or
over-reliance on priors that resulting in the semantic inconsistency between
the visual information and the target lexical words. The most common way is to
encourage the captioning model to dynamically link generated object words or
phrases to appropriate regions of the image, i.e., the grounded image
captioning (GIC). However, GIC utilizes an auxiliary task (grounding objects)
that has not solved the key issue of object hallucination, i.e., the semantic
inconsistency. In this paper, we take a novel perspective on the issue above -
exploiting the semantic coherency between the visual and language modalities.
Specifically, we propose the Consensus Rraph Representation Learning framework
(CGRL) for GIC that incorporates a consensus representation into the grounded
captioning pipeline. The consensus is learned by aligning the visual graph
(e.g., scene graph) to the language graph that consider both the nodes and
edges in a graph. With the aligned consensus, the captioning model can capture
both the correct linguistic characteristics and visual relevance, and then
grounding appropriate image regions further. We validate the effectiveness of
our model, with a significant decline in object hallucination (-9% CHAIRi) on
the Flickr30k Entities dataset. Besides, our CGRL also evaluated by several
automatic metrics and human evaluation, the results indicate that the proposed
approach can simultaneously improve the performance of image captioning (+2.9
Cider) and grounding (+2.3 F1LOC).
