in this talk i will explain an interpretation (due to lewis bowen) of the f-invariant as a variant of sofic entropy: it is the exponential growth rate of the expected number of ``good models'' for an action over a random sofic approximation. i will then introduce the relative f-invariant and provide a similar interpretation of this quantity. this provides a formula for the growth rate of the expected number of good models over a type of stochastic block model.