Shuge Unlimited

Sep 16, 2026 · Databases

Why Milvus 3.0 Pagination Breaks After Reranking: When Cursor Scores Cross Worlds

Milvus 3.0's search iterator pagination fails after reranking because the cursor uses the last page's score as a boundary, but reranking replaces ANN distances with model predictions (e.g., XGBoost raw scores), causing the filter condition to exclude nothing and return duplicate pages. Milvus now explicitly rejects combining function chains with search iterators rather than fixing pagination, as the fix would require carrying original distances through the entire reduce pipeline—a feature-level change. Workarounds include using offset within single-search limits or moving reranking to the application layer.