  Despite the great achievements of the modern deep neural networks (DNNs), the
vulnerability/robustness of state-of-the-art DNNs raises security concerns in
many application domains requiring high reliability. Various adversarial
attacks are proposed to sabotage the learning performance of DNN models. Among
those, the black-box adversarial attack methods have received special
attentions owing to their practicality and simplicity. Black-box attacks
usually prefer less queries in order to maintain stealthy and low costs.
However, most of the current black-box attack methods adopt the first-order
gradient descent method, which may come with certain deficiencies such as
relatively slow convergence and high sensitivity to hyper-parameter settings.
In this paper, we propose a zeroth-order natural gradient descent (ZO-NGD)
method to design the adversarial attacks, which incorporates the zeroth-order
gradient estimation technique catering to the black-box attack scenario and the
second-order natural gradient descent to achieve higher query efficiency. The
empirical evaluations on image classification datasets demonstrate that ZO-NGD
can obtain significantly lower model query complexities compared with
state-of-the-art attack methods.
