StressTest: Can YOUR Speech LM Handle the Stress?

ArXi:2505.22765v3 Announce Type: replace Sentence stress refers to emphasis on words within a spoken utterance to highlight or contrast an idea. It is often used to imply an underlying intention not explicitly stated. Recent speech-aware language models (SLMs) have enabled direct audio processing, allowing models to access the full richness of speech to perform audio reasoning tasks such as spoken question answering. Despite the crucial role of sentence stress in shaping meaning and intent, it remains largely overlooked in evaluation and development of SLMs. We address this gap by.