Model adaptation may be performed to take a general model trained with a set of training data (possibly large), and adapt the model using a set of domain-specific training data (possibly small). The parameters, structure, or configuration of a model trained in one domain (called the background domain) may be adapted to a different domain (called the adaptation domain), for which there may be a limited amount of training data. The adaption may be performed using the Boosting Algorithm to select an optimal basis function that optimizes a measure of error of the model as it is being iteratively refined, i.e., adapted.