Sofic homological invariants and the Weak Pinsker Property

A probability-measure-preserving transformation has the Weak Pinsker Property (WPP) if for every $\epsilon>0$ it is measurably conjugate to the direct product of a transformation with entropy $<\epsilon$ and a Bernoulli shift. In a recent breakthrough, Tim Austin proved that every ergodic transformation satisfies this property. Moreover, the natural analog for amenable group actions is also true. By contrast, this paper provides a counterexample in which the group $\Gamma$ is a non-abelian free group and the notion of entropy is sofic entropy. The counterexample is a limit of hardcore models on random regular graphs. In order to prove that it does not have the WPP, this paper introduces new measure conjugacy invariants based on the growth of homology of the model spaces of the action. The main result is obtained by showing that any action with the WPP has subexponential homology growth in dimension $0$, while the counterexample has exponential homology growth in dimension $0$.