A method and apparatus for training an acoustic model are disclosed. A training corpus is accessed and converted into an initial acoustic model. Scores are calculated for a correct class and competitive classes, respectively, for each token given the acoustic model. From this score a misclassification measure is calculated and then a loss function is calculated from the misclassification measure. The loss function also includes a margin value that varies over each iteration in the training. Based on the calculated loss function the acoustic model is updated, where the loss function with the margin value is minimized. This process repeats until such time as an empirical convergence is met.