In this paper, we explore multi-expert Conformal Risk Control (CRC) algorithms for pairwise LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation in open-ended dialogue. Our core insight is that multi-expert aggregation offers a complementary remedy to CRC: whereas CRC controls risk at the decision threshold through abstention, aggregation sanitizes the scoring function at its source. Guided by this, we first design two multi-expert CRC methods: Score Averaging and Decision Voting, which aggregate at the score and decision levels, respectively. While both strategies outperform single-expert methods on homogeneous expert panels, on heterogeneous LLM judges they remain risk-valid but recover only limited coverage, because a uniform threshold cannot match the experts’ distinct scoring scales. To resolve this issue, we further propose Marginal-Calibrated Conformal Consensus (MC³): it captures distinct per-expert scales via initial threshold ratios, while jointly tuning a unified decision function Cₜ(x) applied identically in both calibration and test, thereby preserving exchangeability. To evaluate our framework, we construct Panel, a 1,800-pair human pairwise-preference benchmark for open-ended dialogue. It is built on responses generated by four open-weight LLMs over dialogue contexts from three domains (ESConv, MSC, DREAM), with full logit access. In experiments, we find that both Score Averaging and Decision Voting substantially improve accuracy and acceptance rate on homogeneous panels. Notably, MC³ extends these gains to heterogeneous panels by accommodating distinct per-expert scoring scales across all three datasets.

Recent efforts on text-to-audio (TTA) generation are starting to explore fine-grained controllability, e.g., precise timing control, with innovations on conditioning techniques or training-free latent manipulations. However, constrained by data scarcity, their generation performance at scale is still limited. In this study, we recast high-controllability TTA generation as a multi-task learning problem, and introduce a progressive diffusion modeling approach, ControlAudio. Our method adeptly fits distributions conditioned on fine-grained information, including text, timing, and phoneme features, through a step-by-step strategy. First, we propose a data construction method spanning both annotation and simulation, augmenting condition information in the sequence of text, timing, and phoneme. Second, at the model training stage, we pretrain a scalable diffusion transformer (DiT) on large-scale text-audio pairs, achieving high-fidelity TTA generation, and then incrementally integrate the timing and phoneme features, expanding controllability. Finally, at the inference stage, we propose progressively guided generation, which sequentially emphasizes more fine-grained information, aligning inherently with the coarse-to-fine sampling nature of DiT. Extensive experiments show that ControlAudio achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of temporal accuracy and speech clarity, significantly outperforming existing methods on both objective and subjective evaluations. Demo samples are available at: https://control-audio.github.io/Control-Audio.