Machine-learning-as-a-service (MLaaS) has attracted millions of users to
their splendid large-scale models. Although published as black-box APIs, the
valuable models behind these services are still vulnerable to imitation
attacks. Recently, a series of works have demonstrated that attackers manage to
steal or extract the victim models. Nonetheless, none of the previous stolen
models can outperform the original black-box APIs. In this work, we conduct
unsupervised domain adaptation and multi-victim ensemble to showing that
attackers could potentially surpass victims, which is beyond previous
understanding of model extraction. Extensive experiments on both benchmark
datasets and real-world APIs validate that the imitators can succeed in
outperforming the original black-box models on transferred domains. We consider
our work as a milestone in the research of imitation attack, especially on NLP
APIs, as the superior performance could influence the defense or even
publishing strategy of API providers.