Abstract— The ever-increasing demand for mobile communication capacity has motivated the development of adaptive antenna array assisted spatial processing techniques for bandwidth efficiency, high-throughput quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) systems. We evaluate performance of adaptive beamforming assisted detection for QAM systems in Rayleigh fading environments. An adaptive minimum symbol error rate design, referred to as the least symbol error rate, is shown to be capable of successfully operating in fast fading conditions and to consistently outperform the conventional adaptive beamforming benchmarker based on the least mean square algorithm.