diff --git a/src/llama-graph.cpp b/src/llama-graph.cpp
index e74c9ff53b05a..4493fb164eb12 100644
--- a/src/llama-graph.cpp
+++ b/src/llama-graph.cpp
@@ -1556,23 +1556,30 @@ void llm_graph_context::build_pooling(
                 ggml_tensor * inp_cls = build_inp_cls();
                 inp = ggml_get_rows(ctx0, inp, inp_cls);
 
-                if (cls != nullptr && cls_b != nullptr) {
+                if (cls) {
                     // classification head
                     // https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/blob/5af7d41e49bbfc8319f462eb45253dcb3863dfb7/src/transformers/models/roberta/modeling_roberta.py#L1566
-                    cur = ggml_add(ctx0, ggml_mul_mat(ctx0, cls, inp), cls_b);
+                    cur = ggml_mul_mat(ctx0, cls, inp);
+                    if (cls_b) {
+                        cur = ggml_add(ctx0, cur, cls_b);
+                    }
                     cur = ggml_tanh(ctx0, cur);
 
                     // some models don't have `cls_out`, for example: https://huggingface.co/jinaai/jina-reranker-v1-tiny-en
                     // https://huggingface.co/jinaai/jina-reranker-v1-tiny-en/blob/cb5347e43979c3084a890e3f99491952603ae1b7/modeling_bert.py#L884-L896
                     if (cls_out) {
-                        GGML_ASSERT(cls_out_b != nullptr);
-                        cur = ggml_add(ctx0, ggml_mul_mat(ctx0, cls_out, cur), cls_out_b);
+                        cur = ggml_mul_mat(ctx0, cls_out, cur);
+                        if (cls_out_b) {
+                            cur = ggml_add(ctx0, cur, cls_out_b);
+                        }
                     }
                 } else if (cls_out) {
                     // Single layer classification head (direct projection)
                     // https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/blob/f4fc42216cd56ab6b68270bf80d811614d8d59e4/src/transformers/models/bert/modeling_bert.py#L1476
-                    GGML_ASSERT(cls_out_b != nullptr);
-                    cur = ggml_add(ctx0, ggml_mul_mat(ctx0, cls_out, inp), cls_out_b);
+                    cur = ggml_mul_mat(ctx0, cls_out, inp);
+                    if (cls_out_b) {
+                        cur = ggml_add(ctx0, cur, cls_out_b);
+                    }
                 } else {
                     GGML_ABORT("RANK pooling requires either cls+cls_b or cls_out+cls_out_b");
                 }