Rolling bearings are prone to failure due to harsh working environments, which can affect production efficiency. Given the background environmental noise interference, it is difficult to extract the fault characteristics of rolling bearings in the early stages of weak fault signals. Based on adaptive VMD combined with adaptive IMCKD (AVMD-AIMCKD), a rolling bearing fault diagnosis method is proposed in this paper. The vibration signal from the rolling element bearing is processed by adaptive variational modal decomposition (AVMD) to extract and select the time-frequency domain signal characteristics. The Adaptive Improved maximum correlated kurtosis deconvolution (AIMCKD) algorithm is used for noise reduction optimization to obtain the best extraction results. Because the traditional method requires input parameter values for VMD and IMCKD, it is not adaptive. The particle swarm optimization algorithm (PSO) is utilized in this study to optimize two variables: the penalty factor and decomposition mode number of variable mode decomposition (VMD). The filter length and shift order of the improved maximum correlated kurtosis deconvolution (IMCKD) are optimized to make it adaptive. The viability of the method is substantiated through simulations, and the efficacy and precision are validated by comparative studies. The experimental results show that the AVMD-AIMCKD method has high accuracy and robustness in rolling bearing fault diagnosis and provides an accurate reference for rolling bearing health monitoring in engineering practice. The AVMD-AIMCKD method effectively extracts the early fault features through adaptive optimization, overcomes the restrictions of traditional methods, and provides a more accurate and reliable tool for bearing fault signal diagnosis.