diff --git a/lerobot/common/policies/smolvla/modeling_smolvla.py b/lerobot/common/policies/smolvla/modeling_smolvla.py
index a6745880..5e0a9622 100644
--- a/lerobot/common/policies/smolvla/modeling_smolvla.py
+++ b/lerobot/common/policies/smolvla/modeling_smolvla.py
@@ -157,9 +157,13 @@ def load_smolvla(
 
     state_dict, _ = standardise_state_dict(state_dict, set(model.state_dict().keys()))
 
-    missing, unexpected = model.load_state_dict(state_dict)
+    # HACK(aliberts): to not overwrite normalization parameters as they should come from the dataset
+    norm_keys = ("normalize_inputs", "normalize_targets", "unnormalize_outputs")
+    state_dict = {k: v for k, v in state_dict.items() if not k.startswith(norm_keys)}
 
-    if missing or unexpected:
+    missing, unexpected = model.load_state_dict(state_dict, strict=False)
+
+    if not all(key.startswith(norm_keys) for key in missing) or unexpected:
         raise RuntimeError(
             "SmolVLA %d missing / %d unexpected keys",
             len(missing),