Adversarial attacks often involve random perturbations of the inputs drawn
from uniform or Gaussian distributions, e.g., to initialize optimization-based
white-box attacks or generate update directions in black-box attacks. These
simple perturbations, however, could be sub-optimal as they are agnostic to the
model being attacked. To improve the efficiency of these attacks, we propose
Output Diversified Sampling (ODS), a novel sampling strategy that attempts to
maximize diversity in the target model's outputs among the generated samples.
While ODS is a gradient-based strategy, the diversity offered by ODS is
transferable and can be helpful for both white-box and black-box attacks via
surrogate models. Empirically, we demonstrate that ODS significantly improves
the performance of existing white-box and black-box attacks. In particular, ODS
reduces the number of queries needed for state-of-the-art black-box attacks on
ImageNet by a factor of two.