Lots of residual stress data is usually required to support the machining process optimization of the thin-walled component. In this work, an inverse method to determine the residual stress profile for end milling titanium alloy Ti-6Al-4V is developed based on the measured thin plate deformation. Firstly, the hyperbolic tangent function is introduced to parameterize the residual stress profile of end milling. Then the mapping relationship between the residual stress profile and the bending deflection of thin plate is established. Furthermore, a solution algorithm to determine the characteristic coefficients of the residual stress profile from the measured deflection is proposed. And the residual stress profiles under different cutting conditions are inversely solved. Finally, six groups of end milling verification experiments are conducted and a high average prediction accuracy of 90.19% is obtained. The proposed reverse method can quickly obtain the residual stress profile by measuring the machining deformation of thin plate.