At elevated temperatures, glasses crystallize via thermally activated diffusion.However, metallic glasses can also undergo deformation-induced crystallization at very low temperatures. Here we demonstrate the crystallization of Al 50 Fe 50 metallic glasses under cyclic deformation at 50 K using molecular dynamics simulations, and reveal the underlying atomic-scale processes. We demonstrate that stress-driven nonaffine atomic rearrangements, or shear diffusion transformation (SDT) events, lead to successive metabasin-to-metabasin transitions and long-range ordering. We also illustrate that the nucleation and growth of the crystal proceed via collective attachment of ordered clusters, advancing the amorphous/crystal interface in an intermittent manner. The cooperative nature of the step-like crystallization is attributed to the large activation volume of Eshelby transformations which generate as a byproduct non-affine "diffusive" atomic displacements that accumulate over loading cycles. The dual nature of "shear" (affine) and "diffusion" (non-affine) in lowtemperature stress-driven SDT events thus unifies inelasticity with crystallization.