Various embodiments of the present invention provide systems and methods for data processing. As an example, a data processing circuit having a data detection circuit is disclosed that includes: a scaling circuit, a soft output calculation circuit, and a factor calculation circuit. The scaling circuit is operable to scale a branch metric value by a scaling factor to yield a scaled output. The soft output calculation circuit is operable to calculate a soft output based at least in part on the scaled output. The factor calculation circuit operable to modify the scaling factor based at least in part on the soft output.