Methods and systems for characterizing a subterranean formation using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) measurements are described herein. One method includes locating a downhole logging tool in a wellbore that traverses the subterranean formation, and performing NMR measurements to obtain NMR data for a region of the subterranean formation. The NMR data is processed by employing sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) to determine a multi-dimensional property distribution of the NMR data (e.g., T1-T2, D-T2, and D-T1-T2 distributions). The sparse Bayesian learning can utilize Bayesian inference that involves a prior over a vector of basis coefficients governed by a set of hyperparameters, one associated with each basis coefficient, whose most probable values are iteratively estimated from the NMR data. The sparse Bayesian learning can achieve sparsity because posterior distributions of many of such basis coefficients are sharply peaked around zero.