With wave-particle decomposition, a unified gas-kinetic wave-particle (UGKWP) method has been developed for the multiscale flow simulations. With the variation of cell's Knudsen number, the UGKWP method captures the transport process in all flow regimes without kinetic solver's constraint on the numerical mesh size and time step being less than the particle mean free path and collision time. In the current UGKWP method, the cell's Knudsen number, which is defined as the ratio of particle collision time to numerical time step, is used to distribute the components in the wave-particle decomposition. However, the adaptation of particle in UGKWP is mainly for the capturing of the non-equilibrium transport, and the cell's Knudsen number alone is not enough to identify the non-equilibrium state. For example, in the equilibrium flow regime with a Maxwellian distribution function, even at a large cell's Knudsen number, the flow evolution can be still modelled by the Navier-Stokes solver. More specifically, in the near space environment both the hypersonic flow around a space vehicle and the plume flow from a satellite nozzle will encounter a far field rarefied equilibrium flow in a large computational domain. In the background dilute equilibrium region, the large particle collision time and a uniform small numerical time step can result in a large local cell's Knudsen number and make UGKWP track a huge number of particles for the far field background flow. But, in this region the analytical wave representation can be legitimately used in UGKWP to capture the nearly equilibrium flow evolution. Therefore, to further improve the efficiency of UGKWP for multiscale flow simulations, an adaptive UGKWP (AUGKWP) method will be developed with the introduction of an additional local flow variable gradient-dependent Knudsen number. As a result, the wave-particle decomposition in UGKWP will be determined by both cell's and gradient's Knudsen numbers, and the use of particle in UGKWP is solely to capture the non-equilibrium flow transport. The current AUGKWP becomes much more efficient than the previous one with the cell's Knudsen number only in the determination of wave-particle composition. Many numerical tests, including Sod shock tube, normal shock structure, hypersonic flow around cylinder, flow around reentry capsule, and an unsteady nozzle plume flow, have been conducted to validate the accuracy and efficiency of the AUGKWP method. Compared with the original UGKWP method, the AUGKWP method achieves the same accuracy, but has advantages in memory reduction and computational efficiency in the simulation for the flow with the co-existing of multiple regimes.